Oskar Linden has provided an update / post-mortem on the recent bout of griefing that took place across the grid as a result of person or persons unknown abusing the advanced user experience code that was released onto the Magnum Release Channel two weeks ago.
The problem hit on Monday 4th June when the advanced teleport functions released to Magnum were used to teleport individuals or groups around the grid, with some people reporting they were teleported to the likes of The Cornfield, while others found themselves unexpectedly picked up and dropped into stores or meetings.
Linden Lab reacted rapidly to the issue, determining a fix for the exploit on the afternoon of the 4th (SLT) and deployed across the entire grid in a rolling restart that affected the main channel and all release channels.
The key points relating to the issue remain:
The exploit came about due to a permissions restriction within the advanced tools not working as anticipated
To prevent further misuse of the code, the advanced tools were also removed from the Magnum RC channel
Both the code and the associated test plans have been revised and are being run through LL’s QA process to better ensure the situation of the 4th June is unlikely to be repeated when the code is rolled-out once more
Coyot Linden estimates that the advanced experience tools project has been delayed by around 2-3 weeks as a result of these events
LL are at this point in time unclear as to when the tools are likely to be rolled back out onto a Release Channel; the slot assigned to the tools on the Magnum RC has now been taken by other security issues in preparation for their roll-out to the grid.
One immediate outcome of the griefing situation is that the teleport capability has been revised so that when someone is teleported, the function will tell them the name of the owner of the object that teleported them (thus allowing any potential abuser of the system to be reported to LL via an Abuse Report).
Update June 6th: Oskar Linden has confirmed that the Advanced Creation Tools capabilities that were rolled-out to the Magnum RC channel will remain disabled until at least next week, although no firm decision has been on re-enabling them.
Update June 5th 11:30 UTC:The rolling restarts completed at 03:39 UTC. At present, no further updates have been given on the forum post relating to the restarts, but this may change later during the course of today. Oskar Linden has reiterated that due to this rolling restart, there will be no main channel deploy today and that details on Wednesday’s RC deploys are still TBA. My apologies for late timing of this update; a small matter of real life prevented me putting my nose in front of the keyboard any sooner!
Last week saw elements of the new Second Life Advanced Creator Tools rolled-out to the Magnum channel. As I reported at the time, the tools were issued without the new permissions system, but with safeguards that (it was hoped) would prevent misuse.
Today, however, a party or parties unknown started to use teleport functions of the new tools outside of the Magnum Release Channel as a means of griefing. People first became aware of the issue as individuals and groups started finding themselves randomly teleported around the grid, which sparked speculation on Twitter. Later, messages started circulating in-world among groups, outlining issues, such as this one, sent out to the NCI Citizens Helper Group (with thanks to Raylene Gothly)
Ok to everyone, there is something seems grid wide, we do not know if its a bad code in certain sims or if someone has found a way to teleport grief. But its happening all over, so I’m not sure. however I’d like to let everyone know we are aware of this. Suddenly you are just teleported away, best to log off and relog to get out of it, as it seems to continue to teleport you, I was teleported 3 times when I relogged… Dont be frightened it just seems to be a mess up.
The only regions unaffected by the griefing tool appear to have been those on the Magnum RC (where the new teleport functionality has safeguards) and those sims that had script capabilities disabled. Messages were thus circulated to land holders to disable scripting in their regions to avoid the issue, at least until Linden Lab responded to the situation.
Linden Lab themselves commenced efforts to stop the problem with emergency rolling restarts across the grid, announced via a Grid status update and a forum post:
To solve a security issue with the Experience Tools that were deployed to Magnum last week we are doing an emergency simulator rolling restart deploy. This has already begun.
Regions on the following channels will be restarted with the fixed code:
Main Channel
BlueSteel
LeTigre
Magnum will not be restarted because the issue is not possible in Magnum regions. We will have no rolling restart Tuesday morning. The Wednesday morning RC channels will roll at the usual time.
We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your understanding.
I’ll update here when further information is available.
As the new month arrives, Linden Lab appears to be kicking-off a number of outward initiatives.
Splash Screen Images Updated
First comes the latest set of secondlife.com splash screen images, which match the current masquerade banner theme on the SL Marketplace. This time there are three images in the set, which have been supplied by Strawberry Singh and Winter Jefferson, Whimsy Winx, and Sissy Scarborough and Mel Vanbeek respectively.
New secondlife.com splash screen image
Remember that in order to see the new images, you’ll need to log out of secondlife.com.
WhatIs Page Re-vamped
In keeping with the use of user-generated content, the What Is Second Life webpage has been given a revamp. For those unfamiliar with the WhatIs page, it has been the page that tries to explain Second Life (no easy task in and of itself), and is accessible from the link on the secondlife.com splash screen, or at http://secondlife.com/whatis/.
Previously, this page played host to the Linden Lab created video promoting Second Life:
In the new layout, WhatIs replaces the LL video with a selection of user-created videos intended to help showcase Second Life to the novice / potential user, complete with an additional JOIN NOW button that takes people to the sign-up page.
Also included is the What’s Hot section of the Destination Guide, while in the What Is section, there is a link that displays the most recent posts to the my.sl social feed (or if you are an existing user and already logged-in to secondlife.com, to your own my.sl feed page).
Part of the new WhatIs page
E-mail Campaign
LL look to be trying to improve their outward communications, with the launch of an e-mail campaign designed to encourage people to follow the Second.Life account on my.secondlife.com (my.sl for short). This account promises to be a provider of up-to-the minute news, etc., with the strapline: Be the first to know. Breaking SL News and More. Get the latest community updates, beta invites and more, without leaving Second Life!
This is interesting as it more-or-less amounts to the first “official” statement from Linden Lab on the subject of how to keep abreast of news from the company since Amanda Linden infamously announced the launch of the Lithium “Community Communications Platform” (which runs the current blogs and forums) – and then told users that to keep up with LL’s news on SL, they should go visit Facebook…
Version 3.3.2.258114 of the official SL Viewer, released on May 29th, sees Local Textures officially reach the mainstream official Viewer. Previously, the option has only been available in Beta and Development releases of the Viewer.
Contributed by Vaalith Jinn, and an extension of his popular Bitmap Browser found in many TPVs, Local Textures allows users to temporarily apply textures from their computer’s hard drive to their in-world objects, including the ability to apply skin and clothing textures to avatars. Such textures are not physically uploaded to the SL servers, but are accessed locally; as such, they only remain “active” for your current SL session, after which they must again be selected once more. In this, they are functionally similar to the Temporary Textures capabilities found in TPVs – but with some important differences.
I’ve covered Local Textures in detail already, and refer you to that post for an in-depth look at using the capability when building. However, it’s worth highlighting the key points here for reference:
Local Textures works both with applying textures to prims and to applying skins and clothes to avatars – so clothing / skin designers can test their work using the official Viewer in the same way as they can using Temporary Textures on popular TPVs
If you use a local graphics editor to make changes to a texture that has been applied within SL using Local Textures, any changes you save in the editor will be immediately applied to the texture in-world
Local Textures does not physically upload anything to the SL servers – this means that the results of anything you apply can only be seen in your own world view; anyone else will see an untextured surface in their Viewer; thus the option cannot be used to test textures in collaborative build projects
Local Textures does not “break” Temporary Textures in TPVs, and TPVs currently are not prevented from offering the Temporary Texture upload capability; as such, both options may be offered by TPVs (as is currently the case with the Dolphin Viewer
As noted in my previous article on Local Textures (linked to above), enhancements to SL may eventually break Temporary Textures at some point in the future, but this is currently far from clear.
Local Textures and Skins / Clothing
As I didn’t cover using Local Textures with clothing and skins in the previous article, here’s a brief summary:
Select Edit Appearance by right-clicking on your avatar or going to ME -> APPEARANCE.
Click on the cog button at the bottom of the floater.
For skin tests, select NEW BODY PART -> NEW SHAPE
For clothes, select NEW CLOTHES-> the require clothing item / layer
The desired editor will open.
Click on the texture box (for skins, click on the required body textures selection box).
The Texture Picker is displayed – click on the Local radio button, and use ADD to local, select, apply the texture.
Selecting test skins using Local Textures
Again, the ability to make changes on-the-fly to applied textures and seeing the results immediately in-world, offers a powerful and unique capability to Local Textures that should assist creators and builders.
There has been much in the way of heated debate on the subject of the mesh parametric deformer and standard sizes for avatars of late. So much so that in this week’s Metareality podcast, Kimberly Winnington (Gianna Borgnine in SL), deformer coder Karl Stiefvater (Qarl Fizz in SL) and in-world content creator Cathy Foil discussed the debate at some length and touched on other aspects of the deformer project.
The following is a summary of the core aspects of the discussion, presented in the panelist’s own words. My thanks to Kimberly for allowing me to produce this piece.
[2:10] Kimberly Winnington (KW): As it stands now, mesh items have to be built to the default avatars like the Ruth Avatar and then be deformed.
[2:32] Karl Stiefvater (KS): There’s a slight difference between Ruth, the actual Ruth – a lot of people call different shapes “Ruth”, so that’s a bad term to use – and the important shape, the one that you get when you say, “Hey, I want to do a shape!” and you don’t touch any of the other dials … and I call that the “default shape”.
[2:58] KW: So as it is now, clothing has to be built to that default shape before it can be deformed.
[3:04] KS: Right.
[3:05] KW: And it’s been suggested it should … that group of things like the default avatar should include some sort of standard size as well, even though that’s not officially a feature at this time.
[3:22] KS: That is correct. The rationale there is the deformer isn’t perfect and if you start with a shape that’s closer to your end shape before you actually tweak it, you can get superior results … Even if the deformer worked perfectly, when you design a shirt with a floral print … and you put it on someone with their body weight turned all the way up … the floral print is going to be distorted … So with the new system, the artist could say, “I’m going to repaint that floral print so it doesn’t get stretched out.”
[4:19] KW: There’s this fight going on. Emma Gilmore, also known as Elie Spot – she is of course on the standard sizing side, she was one of the people who worked with a bunch of other designers and came up with the standard sizes. And then I guess on the other side of the argument is Maxwell Graf … he’s on the side that the standard sizing is a marketing ploy and is awful and we shouldn’t even tolerate its existence. And I guess I’m somewhere in the middle of those two arguments on the basis I kind of agree with the standard sizing – not as the official solution because I don’t want to change my avatar … so I’m all for the deformer and do not want to have standard sizing as the only solution. However, I would have a much better chance of fitting into something without a lot of stretching if I stretched from a size that was closer to my avatar than the default avatar … But I still think that it’s at least a solution that should be discussed; where the starting-off point for the deformer should maybe be closer to a standard size.
[6:56] KS: It sounds like you and I are in agreement …
[7:15] KW: The other thing that came up was … Emma was talking to you about possibly having a way they could convert current meshes without having to re-upload, and you had suggested to her that she post on the JIRA and get some feedback from some other people. So the problem became she posted on the JIRA and she posted a Plurk about both these issues. like let’s discuss where we should start from and lets talk about whether we should be re-uploading or converting and how should we do that … So it started this huge fiasco where everybody kind-of attacked her both on the JIRA and totally all over Plurk, and were like, “you’re wrong, you shouldn’t be posting here…” … I actually agree with her and think she has a good point; but whether you agree with her or not, the topics she brought up are important for us to discuss as a community, especially designers and people who want to wear mesh. Because once the thing is final – you know how things go in Second Life; it will come out and everyone will be unhappy with it but it will be too late to do anything about it. So you have to do it now …
[9:59] KS: The deformer isn’t perfect. There are problems and what she’s proposing … is an extension … so it doesn’t take anything away from what you had before; it’s just adding new features. So how can you hate something that has everything you want but has this extra thing that somebody else wants? How does that engender white-hot hatred? I don’t understand.
[10:36] KW: I think there’s two things. I think the first on is not understanding that it works in collaboration with the deformer. So I think there’s a lot of people…they hear “standard sizing” and they are automatically like, “No”, without understanding that it’s not going to work like standard sizing is now … that you have to fit to that standard size. This is just in collaboration with the deformer, and I almost want to name it something else….
[11:03] KS: How about “alternate bases”? … Alternate bases, everyone.
[11:14] KW: The other thing that comes up is that a lot of people feel like that if we make a solution that fits … then Linden Lab will stop trying to think about trying to create a new overall avatar mesh.
Karl Stiefvater (Qarl Fizz)
[11:47] KS: I don’t thing that we’ve forced them to do anything ever … They’ve never given in, ever! So I don’t see that as a smart strategy … One thing I want to add to this, tho, is this other aspect that I don’t think anybody knows about. And that is, Linden Lab, internally, is … struggling with a question that is probably going to delay the deformer even more. And that is, they don’t know if they like the default avatar as the base. They think there might be a better base. … Then the question is, so how do you pick a better base? Some of them are suggesting … that adding curves is easier than removing curves, so if the base was something that had no boobs, that had no curves or shapes whatsoever, that might perform better … But they have no system in mind for making this call. So this is like one of those objections that can never be necessarily resolved, which is very dangerous for the project. So one of the things I like about this alternate bases idea is it neutralises this potential problem, because if they think there is a better base avatar, we can just add it later. As soon as they decide what that perfect base is, we’ll just add it to the list. So it’s beneficial for reasons completely unrelated to the whole fight right now, so that’s something to keep in mind. That’s mainly why I’m sort-of leaning this way … because it kills two birds, and one of these birds is otherwise potentially project destroying.
[14:23] Cathy Foil (CF): Is it possible to have the content creators load-up their own custom bases for their mesh? Would that be possible? Or would they have to create their own blend shapes so they work with the sliders?
[14:40] KS: No … they would have to use the existing shapes, the existing parameters. But they could specify their own set of parameters; that’s doable, but I’m a little bit afraid that that’s over-designed … so I think that maybe down the road that’s a good option, but I think for right now just a set … just six or seven different bases….
[15:16] CF: I did have a wackadoodle idea I wanted to put forward. I know it’s probably way too late in the development … right now you have the avatar mesh is driving the deformer of the mesh clothing, and I thought of the idea of having “deformer underwear” so to speak, an invisible mesh that you wear so that the avatar’s mesh deforms the underwear but then the underwear deforms the clothing mesh … so that the designers could create custom underwear that would only fit over certain parts of the avatar if they wanted or they could have more vertices in the underwear that would spread out the deformer so that they would deform the clothing mesh maybe a little bit more evenly.
[16:08] KS: That’s a clever idea … but no it’s too late for that! [laughs] But that’s interesting and that could definitely be in version 2 … Then clothing could work on avatars that are completely alien, you know, something you couldn’t dial around … like an elephant .. you could create an elephant avatar and then your hoodie or your dress would fit…
From here, the discussion moved out to talk about design techniques before moving on to the remaining topics of the podcast. For those interested in the mesh deformer and the ongoing debate, I thoroughly recommend listing to the podcast in its entirety, which also includes issues such as DMCA, copyrights and a discussion about the use and impact of the SL Marketplace.
Tateru brings word that Linden Lab have e-mailed those involved with the Second Life Solution Provider Programme to inform them it will be shut down at the end of May 2012.
With the closure, the current Solution Provider directory will be moved to a new wiki page, where information will be presented in a “shortened version” of the directory and which Solution Providers will be able to maintain themselves.
The e-mail from Linden Lab itself reads:
Dear Solution Providers,
Thank you for your participation in the Solution Provider program. As of May 31, 2012 Linden Lab will be officially ending the Solution Provider program.
As part of the program’s closure, we will do the following:
Replace the current Solution Provider Directory with a shortened version on the Second Life wiki (more information on the modified Directory below).
Close the SLDev group and in-world region.
Remove all Solution Provider program related wiki pages on secondlife.wiki.com [sic*].
As of May 31, a modified version of the Directory will be located on the Second Life wiki. The direct link will be sent out closer to the 31st. It will include the name of your company (with a link to your company’s website), services provided, country/countries where you work, languages, and company description. All the above information is taken directly from your current listing. Once live, you will be able to modify your listing by logging onto the Second Life wiki.
It has been a pleasure working with and getting to know so many of you over the past 4 years. I wish you all the best in your endeavours within and outside of Second Life.
Regards, Madhavi Linden
The news is unsurprising in some respects: the directory as it stands appears to be largely stagnant, and the last remnant of the secondlifegid.net Technology Programmes pages (which otherwise resolve back to people’s SL dashboards), and many of the case studies listed within the pages no longer exist in-world. This reflects the fact that the directory does not lend itself to easy update in its present form, and has grown increasingly stale since the lab shifted its focus away from real world business use of Second Life in 2010 to concentrate on the product as a consumer platform.
Similarly, the SLDev group has been largely ignored over the last three years, with much of what used to occur within it having been shifted to mailing lists such as the open-source developer’s mailing list. These mailing lists will not be impacted by the close of the SLDev group.
*As we know, the SL wiki URL is in fact wiki.secondlife.com.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 