Peter Gray, Linden Lab’s Senior Director of Global Communications is departing the company after nine years.
Peter broke the news to me via e-mail on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2018 prior to e-mailing a number of other people. He first joined Linden Lab in 2009 from Lewis PR, a technology-focused company, where he gained his first exposure to both Linden Lab and Second Life. This means his experience with the company extends back more than a decade.
It’s been a privilege to represent Linden Lab, our innovative products, and their incredible users as a Linden for the past nine years. I wish our user communities and my Linden colleagues all the best for the future, and I’ll be rooting for their continued success.
– Peter Gray, Senior Director of Communications, Linden Lab
Throughout his time at the Lab, Peter has been one of the public faces of the company, rising from PR Specialist to his current position of Senior Director of Global Communications, gathering a wealth of knowledge about the Lab’s products along the way. In-world, his Classic avatar has often been visible at events such as the SL Birthday celebrations, taking questions at Meet the Lindens events, VWBPE conferences and more. More recently, Peter’s role has extended beyond Second Life to encompass Blocksworld and Sansar, and he has never failed to deal with the myriad question I and a lot of other bloggers have forwarded to the Lab over the years, as and where he has been able to do so.
In departing Linden Lab, Peter is moving on to a new role with the communications team at Facebook AI Research – and I wish him well in the new role, although I can honestly say he will be sorely missed.
Peter Gray and his Linden alter-ego
On a personal level, I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Peter for all of his help over the years; I’ve deeply appreciated our working relationship, and can say with hand on heart that his support, assistance and insight is one of the major reasons I’ve kept on blogging about SL for so long; his support – and what of the Lab as a whole – has, I believe allowed me to present news and information through these pages objectively, and in the knowledge it is as accurate as I could possibly make it.
Throughout all our time in correspondence and conversation, Pete has never been anything less than open, supportive and friendly. I’d like to further thank him for the personal invite to pop into the Lab and pay him a visit if ever I managed to get back to California and make my way up to San Francisco; I’m genuinely sad I never got to take him up on the offer.
Many thanks again, Peter, and wishing you all the best for 2018 and the future!
Meanwhile, on November 28th, and potential of more interest to Second Life and Sansar users, the event saw Tara Hernandez, Senior Director of Systems and Build Engineering at Linden Lab, give a presentation covering Sansar and touching on plans for Second Life, entitled How Linden Lab Built a Virtual World on the AWS Cloud.
Most of the video delves into the intricacies of building a complex platform like Sansar and how Amazon’s products have empowered the Lab. As such, it does come across as quite a dry listen; however, within it there are some useful areas of focus which are worth noting.
For example, the early part of Tara’s presentation touches on some core truths about Second Life. Such as the fact it is a platform now 14+ years old, which started as an environment engineered almost down to the bare metal, taking advantage of what were, at the time, deep-seated optimisations in graphics and networking capabilities.
Over time, these have not only been layered upon almost organically over the years, but have also become – in Tara’s own words – “kinda ugly” in terms of trying to maintain and enhance. This monolithic, deeply rooted approach to the core elements of the platform is – along with the user-driven expectation than the user-generated content within the platform will not break as a result of changes to the platform – one of the major reasons why “updating” Second Life isn’t simply a matter of JFDI, as might be thought.
Aspects such as compliance – another issue which is perhaps a lot more complicated than many might appreciate, given the complexities involved in running services like Second Life and Sansar, where the ability to cash out money adds a lot of additional regulatory overheads (visible and invisible from a user’s perspective) over platforms which only allow users to pay-in.
The video also reveals the depth of the relationship between Linden Lab and Amazon, which in the case of Second Life, stretches back to 2008, and which has encompassed the Lab’s other product, Blocksworld. In particular, it touches on Linden Lab using (and sometimes breaking!) Amazon’s more recent offerings, such as their ECS services, as a beta customer. This is something that Amazon has itself highlighted, featuring Linden Lab and Sansar in one of their own ECS use-case studies (see my article “Project Sansar”: an Amazon ECS case study, from January 2016).
ECS in fact drives almost all of the Sansar back-end, from the Atlas through to the store. In particular, the way in which the ECS application layer is used to present the Sansar Atlas, and manage the entire management of the experiences offered by the Atlas and their instancing, utilising Amazon containers (see 27:40-30:58).
How Sansar uses the Amazon ECA application layer to drive the Atlas & managing experience instancing (screen capture). Credit: Linden Lab / Amazon Web Services Inc.
What’s interesting here is not only the way in which Amazon’s services are being used, but in understanding what is going on from the moment a Sansar user clicks the Visit button in the Atlas, and the lessons the Lab are learning even now, as people use Sansar.
This latter point is itself of interest, as it helps to explain why Linden Lab opened Sansar up to wider audience in what seemed to many of us familiar with virtual space – myself included – to be a premature move. Simply put, they needed more of a flow of people moving through experiences to better judge how experiences can be more efficiently / effectively managed within the Amazon environment – spinning them up / down, instancing, optimising server use, etc.
In terms of Second Life, perhaps the most interesting part of the video can be found at 32:14-34:36, with a look at the recently announced attempts to move all of the Second Life service – including (eventually) the simulators, if possible – the cloud. Officially announced as a project in August 2017, but has been discussed at various in-world meetings such as the TPV Developer meetings.
Credit: Linden Lab / Amazon Web Services Inc.
In particular, the presentation touches on one of the major reasons for attempting the move: costs. Right now, Second Life is dependent upon hardware the Lab has to source and operate through a data centre. Updating this hardware, and the underpinning infrastructure – network, fibre, rack space, etc., – requires continuous and high levels of expenditure (even allowing for re-purposing / write-down of old equipment).
There are also limits, as touched upon in the earlier part of the video, on what can be done within specific areas of Second Life support and maintenance. For example, Tara specifically mentions the core database services (which have been subject to numerous issues over the last year plus). While recovery times for these services has been halved – from three hours to 45 minutes – it is still a considerable outage period from the users’ perspective, and one difficult to bring down further.
Second Life in the cloud – challenges. Credit: Linden Lab / Amazon Web Services Inc.
Thus, an attempt to move Second Life to AWS could resolve a lot of issues for the Lab, and potentially allow them to leverage lessons learned with Sansar together with the capabilities of newer services – like ProxySQL – to further update and improve SL. It might also allow the Lab to move their database operations away from MySQL to more robust products, again following Sansar’s lead.
The shift of a platform from being data centre centric to cloud based is obviously non-trivial, and involves considerable challenges, some of which are outlined by Tara (above). However, from the comments she makes, she is anticipating possibly a dramatic level of progress over the next year. If so, it could be an interesting twelve months.
With thanks to Dassni – The Mesh Cloud for the Twitter pointer to the video.
On Tuesday, July 11th, Linden Lab issued an updated Terms of Service, which is due to come into effect on July 31st, 2017. As is the Lab’s usual practice, anyone logging-in to one of the Lab’s services for the first time after the new Terms have come into force will be required to accept them. As such, a read through is advisable beforehand.
A restructuring of the Terms to include terms and conditions that apply to all Linden Lab products, with separate product-specific references (such as Linden Dollar and LindeX for SL) now contained within product-specific policies. The new Second Life Terms and Conditions contains all the Second Life-specific references that were previously in the Terms of Service.
Reference to the Lab’s wholly owned subsidiaries, Tilia Inc. and Tilia Branch UK Ltd., have been added. These companies will be handling payment services on our behalf under certain circumstances. I first wrote (albeit somewhat speculatively) about Tilia Inc in November 2015.
Minor text revisions to clarify that Linden Lab has discretion to undertake certain account actions.
An updated the arbitration provision in accordance with applicable law.
The first of these bullet points sees the most extensive changes to the ToS, with the removal off sections formerly specific to SL, and the removal of references related to the Second Life (e.g. “inworld”) to more generic terms. These are all clearly part-and-parcel of adopting the ToS to encompass Sansar, and some of the amendments make for interesting reading – such as the definition of terms.
While the blog post refers to “the Second Life Terms and Conditions”, there is no actual link to such a document at present. There is a link to the Community Standards – which are still specific to Second Life. However, it is unclear if this is what is meant by “the Second Life Terms and Conditions” – and if so, they have not as yet been updated to reflect elements of the ToS specific to SL – such as the operation of “bots” or to Skill Gaming / for profit games of chance, Linden Dollars, the LindeX, etc. Nor are the ancillary policies to Second Life listed (e.g. the Machinima policy, Mainland Policy, etc.).
Excluding the changes specific to Second Life (i.e. removal of references and clauses). The most extensive changes to the ToS can be found in the following sections:
1.1 – updates to defined terms
2.2 – licences granted, specifically the section on “Linden Content”
3 Eligibility To Use the Service
4.3 – payment service providers (including Tilia Branch in the UK)
9.6 – Unsolicited Ideas and Materials Prohibited; No Confidential or Special Relationship with Linden Lab
10.2 – Exceptions to Requirement to Arbitrate (dispute resolution).
I’ve not had time to do more than run through a rough comparison between this updated ToS and the current version (last archived via the Wayback machine in April), so my apologies if I’ve missed anything.
Meet the Lindens is a series of conversations / Q&A sessions with staff from Linden Lab, held as a part of the SL Birthday celebrations in-world. They provide opportunities for Second Life users to get to know something about the staff at the Lab: who they are, what they do, what drew them to Second Life and the company, what they find interesting / inspirational about the platform, and so on.
Tuesday, June 20th saw Landon Linden sit down with Saffia Widdershins, and this article hopefully presents some “selected highlights” of the chat, complete with audio extracts from my recording of the event. The official video of the event is embedded at the end of this article.
About Oz and Grumpity Linden
Oz Linden is the Technical Director for Second Life. He joined the company in 2010 specifically to take on the role of managing the open-source aspects of the Second Life viewer and managing the relationship with third-party viewers – in his previous role, he had been responsible for leading the company his was working for in taking their product from closed-source to open-source and then managing the technical side of the product as a open-source project for a number of years.
Over the first two years of his time at the Lab, he was primarily focused on the open-source viewer work and in refining the overall viewer maintenance process, before his role started expanding to encompass more and more of the engineering side of Second Life. When Work on Sansar started in earnest, he pro-actively campaigned within the Lab for the role he has now, with responsibility for managing all of the engineering side of the platform.
He came to Linden Lab out of a desire to do something “fun” after working in the telecommunication arena, notably with voice over IP systems (VOIP), which he defines as being “really interesting technology with some really fascinating challenge”, but in terms of it being fun, it really didn’t do what I wanted it to do.”
He classifies the attraction to working with Second Life as perhaps falling into three core areas: through the open-source nature of the viewer, he is directly involved with how SL users are using the viewer and what they do with it – which can often times take the Lab entirely by surprise; through the fact that the Second Life offers the challenge of trying to implement new technologies alongside of (rather than simply replacing) older technologies; and working with the operations team and others to ensure SL constantly evolves without (as far as is possible) breaking anything – a process he refers to and rebuilding the railway from a moving train.
Grumpity Linden is the Director of Product for Second Life, enjoying what she and Oz jokingly refer to as a “symbiotic relationship”. She actually started at Linden Lab in 2009 as a contractor working for The Product Engine, a company providing end-to-end consulting and software development services, and which support the SL viewer development. She became a “full-time Linden” almost three years ago.
As Director of Product she manages the product team, which oversees a wide range of SL-related activities alongside of Oz’s team. This can involve coordinating the various teams involved in bringing features and updates to Second Life (e.g. coordinating the engineering teams and the QA teams, liaising with legal, financial and compliance to ensure features and capabilities meet any specific requirements in those areas, etc.). This work can also involve looking at specifics within various elements of the overall SL product, such as UI design and layout, etc.
Grumpity has a background in psychology and computer science, but has worked in the oil and gas industry. On moving to the San Francisco area, she crossed over into working within the tech industry, eventually settling at Linden Lab as a contractor, working on the Viewer 2.0 project. She enjoyed working at the Lab so much, she resisted all attempts by her employers to move her elsewhere, finally joining the Lab full-time in 2015.
Like Oz, Grumpity is passionately committed to seeing Second Life continue.
Q&A Session
How much control and input do you have over the direction of second life?
Grumpity: I will let Oz speak more to that, but Bento was conceived and reared and launched all through the efforts of Oz’s team and of Engineering. Certainly, Product took a part in defining that, but this is a great an example of one of the long-time Lindens [Vir Linden] suggesting this as a possibility and then this feature getting worked on.
There was a tonne of time spent defining that work with residents, which I’m also very proud of, I think we absolutely took the right path there, but as to the development of that project – Oz, do you want to speak to it?
Oz: Just to comment to that one point about Bento. The general direction of the project we started out with changed very significantly, once we got residence involved. The essential concept of extending the avatar skeleton and adding capabilities, that was the concept we began with, [but] the specific additions we made to the skeleton changed very dramatically after we got resident designers involved.
Oz Linden
We were planning on doing a quite simplified hand, for example, and the designers came back to us and said, “look, we really need every joint in every finger”, and ultimately they convinced us that was the right thing to do, and in retrospect, it’s obviously worked out really well.
The broad question of who or how we set that direction; it’s one of the things that’s really great about working at the Lab … We have an incredibly collaborative process. Pretty much everyone involved, up to and including the residents – emphatically including the residents, I should say – is empowered to put forward ideas. And so our job isn’t so much thinking up what’s going to happen to Second Life, as it is from just picking from among a myriad of possibilities. We could have a staff of 500, and we wouldn’t have enough to do all of the really cool things that we might in theory be able to do.
So it’s picking and choosing, and we try to shift who we’re making happy at any given time, so we’re spreading it around a little bit … My job is to think about what the technology impact of anything is going to be, how difficult it’s going to be to do, and how long it’s going to take to do it; although even more so that most engineering groups, I think we’re really challenged in figuring out how long it’s going to take for things to happen.
And the Product team, headed by Grumpity, thinks about what the implications are for the way that affects the business, affects the activities people are already doing in Second Life – to the extent that we know! And we work together to pick from the things that are possible and can be done in a time frame that’s good. We try to make sure that we’re doing something new fairly regularly; so we can’t pile on everybody to a project that’s going to take two years, because then for two years, nothing would happen. Well, the company did that once, and we all know how that went…
But yeah, between us, we have a lot to say about it. There are aspects of the way that Second Life evolves that are not really our space. For example, we’re not heavily involved in Governance issues; we’re not heavily involved in thinking how much things may cost. That’s mostly other people. But how it works and what it can do – that’s what we spend our time on!
Grumpity: And to mention, we’re not necessarily heavily involved in compliance issues … but we do spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to minimise the impact of compliance while actually adhering to the needs.
As inventory in the viewer is just pointers to assets on the Lab’s servers, could Linden Lab provide a means for redelivering lost inventory items?
Oz: We have recently put out some changes that are intended to reduce some of the ways we think people were unintentionally deleting things, and we’ve fixed some bugs that may have been responsible for things going astray that shouldn’t [updates reviewed here & now in the release viewer] … She’s right, your inventory is a set of pointers to assets; we have the assets, we don’t have a record of what those pointers were. The pointers are ephemeral; they change dynamically, and we don’t today have a journal of what all the changes were that went through.
That’s an area of concern; unfortunately, solving that problem very likely falls into that project that would take at least two years category that I talked about before, that’s difficult to tackle on the whole. So we’re trying to find aspects of it that we can attack and improve … So we’re trying to find ways to do incremental steps that make inventory more and more robust. If I were to go to Grumpity and say, “this is what it would take to completely solve the inventory problem,” she would end-up saying we can’t commit that large a fraction of our resources for that long to that problem. So we have to find ways to break it down into small pieces, and that’s what we’re doing.
Unfortunately, that means we can’t say all the inventory problems will be solved by the middle of next week or even next year, necessarily.
Grumpity: We spent a lot of time investigating this recent uptick in reports of inventory going to Trash accidentally and getting deleted, and we’ve put in a bunch of viewer-side changes to prevent that, and Firestorm has merged those in. so please make sure your viewer is updated. The new Firestorm release [reviewed here] has all of them, and even some that we haven’t released but are in the latest Maintenance RC viewer [version 5.0.7.327250 at the time of writing this transcript].
I would also like to use this platform to say that we absolutely need viewer logs from the session where the deletion or the disappearance of inventory happened, to continue to diagnose this problem. So if you’re in a position to provide those logs from the session where the inventory loss happened, please, please do. There are multiple JIRA already open – file a new one, reply on the forum, we’ll see all of them, and I will be thrilled to take up the cause and find out what has been going on.
Oz: That’s a point worth emphasising. We don’t keep all the logs for a long time; we couldn’t, they’re just too big. Id you report that three weeks ago, you lost 100,000 things, there is no hope whatsoever that we’re going to learn anything from that report. Those those logs are long gone; we cannot tell what you did or what happened to what you lost.
If you report it the day that you lose something, and we see that report – and we’re watching those reports, we have people who watch those reports all the time – and you attach a viewer log, and there’s a page on the wiki about how to find the logs. And you tell us “I was in this region, at this time, and the following stuff disappeared”, or even: “I was in this region at this time, and I knew that I had it then, but two hours later I noticed that it was all gone.” That gives a window where there’s some hope of us finding information about it. And we can use that information to figure out what happened.
We often will not be able to recover your lost items; occasionally it happens, but unfortunately it’s not the normal. But it would be an enormous help to us to get reports that have that kind of information on them promptly, so we can dig out and try to learn what happened and what went wrong, and then those cases at least, we can fix.
Grumpity: So, for the record. In all of the reported cases where we were able to get logs from the server-side for this inventory loss and actually find the log records for when the deletions happened; from our end it looks like it was a regular case of the user deleting inventory. So in order to figure out what’s going on, we absolutely need viewer logs so that we know what the viewer was doing and why those messages were sent to delete inventory, if you did not intentionally do it.
… Again, I’m going to use this soapbox to say we triage incoming bugs pretty much every [working] day, sometimes we skip a day when there are other things that get in the way. We triage incoming feature requests on a regular basis as well, not quite as frequently, and we pay attention to what’s going on. It is our hand on the pulse, and it is also your best bet for getting bugs addressed. If you write about a bug on the forum, maybe somebody else will file it, but may not, and maybe it will never get to us. If you are sure it’s a but – write a JIRA, and then we’ll see it.
Linden Lab has issued a reminder / warning about the need for Second Life users to keep their account details secure.
It comes as a result of tools such as viewer “wrappers” (third-party applications which must be launched in order to run the viewer) which effectively takes away a user’s ability to control their account. by making changes to both the account password and the e-mail address associated with the account (thus effectively preventing the user from ever recovering their account). In some cases, these viewers / wrappers may even effectively pass control of an account to another user.
All of the above is not only dangerous in terms of account security / integrity – it is also against Linden Lab’s Terms of Service.
The blog post carrying the warning is reproduced in full below, was issued by the Governance Team. It is designed to clarify the use of such viewers / wrappers, and provide Second Life users with guidelines on keeping their accounts secure. Please read and keep in mind.
Hey everyone,
It’s recently come to our attention that there has been an increase in the use of a third-party tools that give account credentials and control over a Resident’s account to another Resident. This and similar products can change an account password and/or details, such as email address, which could prevent an owner from accessing an account, or even from being able to recover the account.
We want to remind everyone that giving another Resident access to your account or account information, by any means and for any reason, is both dangerous and not permitted by the Terms of Service. An account is intended to be used solely by its creator, and keeping your account details secret and secure helps you keep it that way.
We’d like to provide you with some quick tips on how to keep your account secure:
Choose a secure password with upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, spaces, and symbols, and avoid common dictionary words or phrases. For instance, “password” is not a good password, but “wh4tAr g@t4P55!” is much better (though you shouldn’t use that last one either, now that all of Second Life just read it, too).
Choose a secret security question answer. To keep your information extra secure, choose an answer that you will remember, but that no one else could possibly guess. For example, answering “What is your favourite vacation spot?” with “Potsdam, Pennsylvania” isn’t secure if you have that listed as an interest on your social media accounts. Answering “The Wide Wide World of Sports” might be much more secure!
Keep your password and the answer to your security question secret from everyone, regardless of their relationship to you. Only you should know this information; not your significant other, family member, casual acquaintance, person with an honest look in their eye, or anyone else.
Keep your password unique and special to Second Life. Reusing the same password across different platforms or websites makes your account vulnerable if one of those sites suffer a data breach.
No Linden will ever ask for your password. Likewise, there is never a reason for you to enter your password to unlock an item, receive a discount, or anything else.
Use only the official Second Life Viewer, or a Third Party Viewer from the Third Party Viewer Directory. If the viewer does not allow you to log directly into your account for any reason, the viewer is NOT secure.
If you have any problems accessing your account—especially if you believe that your password or security information may be known to anyone other than you—please contact the support team by opening a support case.
In mid-March 2017, Linden Lab introduced a new member of the board of directors via a press release.
William “Bing” Gordon is a man with impressive credentials. The Chief Product Officer of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), where he serves as an advisor and General Partner, Gordon worked with Electronic Arts for 26 years from its founding in 1982, driving the company’s branding strategy with EA Sports, developed EA’s pricing strategy for package goods and on-line games, created EA’s studio organization, and contributed to the design and marketing of many EA franchises, including John Madden Football, The Sims, Sim City, Need for Speed, Tiger Woods Golf, Club Pogo and Command and Conquer. As well as EA and KPCB, he has He has served on the boards of public companies Amazon and Zynga, and was a founding director at Katango (acquired by Google 2011), ngmoco (acquired by DeNA 2010) and Audible (acquired by Amazon in 2008).
William “Bing” Gordon
One of the acknowledged experts in computer gaming, Bing Gordon was awarded the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011, and he held the game industry’s first endowed chair in game design at The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. He is a robust thinker and, unlike many in the tech industry, retains a level head when it comes to the subject of VR – in 2015, he spoke to Fortune.com about the risks involved for companies leaping into the emerging VR market.
In joining Linden Lab, Gordon will will advise on strategy, product, marketing and other issues as Linden Lab continues to improve Second Life and brings to market its new platform for user-created social VR experiences, Sansar – with the Lab particularly emphasising the latter for understandable reasons, CEO Ebbe Altberg noting:
We’re honoured to have Bing join our board of directors and work with our team,” said Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab. “He’s helped to bring to life some of the most influential entertainment experiences in recent memory, and as we prepare to open Sansar for all creators, his insights, expertise, and counsel will prove invaluable.
Bing Gordon isn’t the only relatively recent appointee to the Lab’s board of directors. He joins Mark Britto, in adding his name to LL’s board. Britto is most recently the founder/chairman of Boku, Inc., a mobile on-line payments company he founded in 2009 and which now is the leading name in mobile payments, servicing 50 countries through more than 200 carrier partners. Mr. Britto also serves on the Boards of Angieslist, PayNearMe and Sonder.
Mark Britto
After starting his career in banking, Britto co-founded Accept.com, a peer-to-peer payments company which was purchased by Amazon in 1999, where it became the primary backbone of Amazon’s global payments platform. Britto himself worked for Amazon as a Senior Vice President of Worldwide Services and Sales, prior to departing the company to take over the helm of Ingenio, a communication and e-commerce platform acquired by AT&T in 2007, and more recently re-established as an independent company in May 2013.
From this, it is clear that Britto has a wealth of experience in developing and managing payment services which would appear to be of particular merit to Linden Lab as they continue to operate their micro-currency systems for Second Life and Sansar, together with their Tilia Inc., subsidiary.
Interestingly, Mark Britto joined the Lab’s board in August 2016. However, his biography notes only appeared on the company’s leadership page in April 2017, when it was updated with Bing Gordon’s details.
Together, Mark Britto and Bing Gordon join Jed Smith, Bill Gurley and Dana L. Evan as serving members of the board at Linden Research Inc.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 