How to solve the self-replicating problem once and for all

I don't know that anything needs to be done about self-rezzing, save the prosecution of the person who creates the object (who may or may not be the one who releases it).

But far better than attempting to charge for rez would be some sort of means of detecting dangerous self-rezzing patterns.

In such a case, the Lindens may construct for themselves some sort of command designed to disable rez indefinitely across the grid, a Panic Button to reduce the effectiveness of a self-rep attack.

Perhaps this Panic button would cause the item calling it to die instead, and to protect No-Copy objects, it might simply cause those to return to inventory.

I will admit that my idea might end up being unworkable (I don't know if you can efficiently detect a grid attack from some legitimate high-rez activity), but at the very least, it remains hidden until needed, and attempts to reduce potential collateral damage in the event it is called.

But until grid attacks become more commonplace, I don't think any idea which causes changes as significant as charging per rez is justified, nor do I think that it will be effective in doing anything but squelching interest.

EDIT-ON: Just as a note, I like Raudf's idea below. It seems like it would be useful to check and modify inventory of an object, and modify any scripts witihin without rezzing the object. (Obviously you can't do any positioning or texturing, but inventory control and script functions shouldn't require the object be rezzed at the time)

Another possible idea is a field for "Last Edited By" which may be useful in tracking down whoever last made changes to an item.

One thing I'd like to see that might help some is the ability to at least look at the contents of objects in your folder rather that having to rez it. Won't work with non-mod types, of course, but even that little bit might help prevent some residents from accidentally rezzing a self-replicating pain in the butt.

I don't agree that once a week grid crashes are small annoyance. Grid crashes affect around 6000 people these days. While the grid is down I don't think anyone is selling things from their vendors or having much fun (except for the sociopaths who like breaking things). Leaving the capability in place for grid-wide takedowns is silly; this is ignoring forseeable misuse of the product.

I can't think of any stable multi-user systems that allows any user to consume all available resources and crash the environment for everyone else. There have to be quotas, or surcharges for excessive resource consumption. Lacking that, this game is only as stable as the least civilized community member. The bigger the population gets, the worst the problem will become.

Sorry.

The problem with your opinion is you refuse to see the complete invalidty of your idea. Every prim rezzed has already been paid for by the landowner. When land fees are paid the user says "I have bought this plot, it can hold x prims, those x prims are being allowed by me". If the user decides to let anonymous folks rezz their prims on it, it's their choice, and you shouldn't enforce some bogus prim charge when the prims have /already been paid for/.

So your quota is null, the 'resources' you are bitching about being consumed were paid for beforehand and should be charged for again. The only place that could maybe sorta charge are the open areas such as sandboxes, and that would null the point of using them completely.

The biggest problem I have with this idea is how incredibly selfish you are, trying to ruin alot of safe, valid functions in a reasonably well working system just so you can have some /erroneus and false/ sense of security.

-It's not going to stop anyone.
-Even if it did slow griefers down it'd hurt alot more of those '6000' people you cited every minute of every day, and it'd barely make the greifers blink.
-It goes against the freedom of creation that is a major feature and attraction of the entire premise of secondlife.

As if it happens anything like once a week. I can remember less than a handful of occasions in my time here.

Putting restrictions on my land works for me, because I am not selling anything. I don't do this just to be "nasty" to strangers. I don't mind people looking around, and I will not put in security scripts or make my land no-fly. In my opinion, allowing building, outside scripts and not setting autoreturn makes you an easy target for griefing. I think for many of us, allowing building and scripts could be ok, but no autoreturn is just flirting with disaster.

make all rez scripts auto die after say 5 secs , unless someone is sitting on it,,,,,,
that helps gun makers, and people who have the auto rezz ships, chairs, and such.


you put out a prim that will rezz another prim, that prim will die in 5 secs unless some takes it to invy or sits on it,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,or make it so only so many prims can be rezzed at a time...........

Bad idea. My guns, even my safe guns, could cost me 100 in a manner of moments... lag out while on auto fire? easily 1000L.

All of this seems to actually be a good excuse for you to request a system that'd keep rich players on top since everyone else wouldnt be able to pay for res costs, inventory costs, texture costs, animation costs, sound costs AND vender space, no one would be able to LEARN the system without paying out the ass.

Also, owning a home (when relistate is what funds half of second life) would become even more expensive, I already pay near 2Kl in rent fee a month, I don't want to pay another 500 for prims for god sakes.

No, what LL needs to do is bust virus's based on characteristics.

The item's database key is pulled or used more than 100 times in one parcel or sim by one user or one user's object? the item is locked until a linden can get a look at it.

The item's got a looped script? Locked until a linden can look at it (since some loop rez codes are safe, as they have self deletion timers)

Your idea is just retarded, I'm sorry but it underminds creativity and learning.

Hey! Don't argue, let the "smart people" who we pay so much money to fix it... pfft...

What if everything that requires rez'ing merely has to need an acception by its current owner? Per item, not one accept that allows all other accepts... that way even the fastest clickers could only somewhat lag the system, and be captured in time...

I don't think it's the rezzing causing the crashing, but the physics.

You can hardly ride a vehicle without a sim crash.

Perhaps a better physics engine? hahahahhahh. sorry lost my head. :/

If I understand this then it still kills rezzing vendors. Owners are not always online to accept

Auto-Return:: My friends come over (imagine that, socialising on SL) and we tend to rez things to show or use during our meetings. Turing on Auto-Return would impare that aspect.
Outside Scripting:: See above.
Outside Building:: See above.
Teraforming:: Ummm...Duh! Once you have your land the way you want it, who in their right mind would leave this on? 0.o

For all that, however, taxing (even to give back on derez) is a poorly thought out plan. You shouldn't really need to be rich to be able to build, just to show the ability and drive to do so. Making people pay for thier creativity is a death sentence for the ideal of SL. And yes, you would ahve to be rich to build. I can barely afford my tier as RL does come first. I come to SL for relaxation, not another worry about making payments. I build houses, fountains, sculptures, etc. By your solution, not only would I have to pay to build my works (and some can be quite a lot of prims), but I'd ahve to raise my prices to match that (I try to keep my wares lowpriced so every may enjoy them), and my customers would then ahve to pay to rez them on thier land where thier L$ would be tied up in simply wanting my creations to enhance SL. Thank you. No.

The OP asked for solutions if we said his/hers (sorry, not sure) was unsound. Here goes;

You see, the prim-allotment for land is -not- the limit of prims a sim (or server) can maintain. It is simply as it says. An Allotment. There are ways around such (case in point the Self-Replicating Objects), and, for a most part, these options are used for legitimate usage.

A true cutoff of prim-count -could- be utilised on each and every sim. Halting ALL rezzing once 80% or so of the resources were used (arbitrary % used for discussion, not data). This is not simply rezzing object resources, but ALL resources. If the sim bogs down due to some script, rezzing stops. This would help prevent sim overload of resources, and, hopefully, give the auto-returns a chance to do thier jobs. Though there may still be one heck of a mess to clean up as the SRO's keep replicating.

The problem comes in how to determine legitimate usage from grid-attacks. Weapon manufactures can rez immense amounts of objects in a very short period of time, but are not a threat due to the nature and design of thier builds/scripts. If you look at the numbers on SRO's that cause the grid to go down, I'd be willing to say the numbers are quite low compared to what you might think. Griefers make up for this in other ways, such as putting in resource using scripts, and many, many other factors to acchive thier results.

It's easy for a human to see what is an attack and what is not. It is not easy to program a computer to do such as it requires reasoning (last I looked, whe didn't have true AI yet).

But a human can not react fast enough to use that reasoning. A computer could if it understood what was going on, however.

In short, though I offer an idea for LL to look at, I do not think the solution will be either easily, nor quickly found. SL is a malable world. Transient by it's very nature and imho, LL is doing a remarkable job in dealing with this.

They are reacting to said attacks (yes, this is after the fact, but at lest they are reacting and getting better at it each time). They are setting plans in place for future problems of a like nature. They are looking at means to distinguish between what is a valid use and what is an attack. They are seeking legal means to punish the offenders within the boundries of the law, attempting to make examples that -may- disuade others from like attempts.

~Jessy

why wait, hop over to www.there.com

(yes, they really do charge you for every bullet)

I've personally, accidentally crashed sims with devices as benign as two vehicles crashing head-on, without intending to. Island sims, for that matter, which as I've noticed, tend to be a bit more resilient than the mainland. If you stop object to object rezzes, then people will just use A to B rezzers, or de-link spam devices. If you stop self-replicating rezzers, then people will just go back to filling sims with 10x10x10 cubes. Et-cetera. The only real solution is to just accept that occasionally, the grid/sim/whatever will go down, and that the person responsible will likely be banned (and promptly get an alt, and do it again). I've been on SL for approximately 11 months. In the time I've been on SL, there's been *maybe* 5 attacks that were potent enough to down the grid. It's likely just a bad coincidence that two of them happened so close together, then again, it might not be.

To those of you saying that objects should be a pay-per rez? That's ludicrous. Even at L$1 per prim, just to keep FurNation rezzed, that would be about L$20,000 on my head. Even with a free allotment of 1,000 prims, 1,000 prims is about the amount I burn through in an average build session (Or terraforming-- I do mine with high explosives. Teehee).

To Al, 5 second rez if the object isn't sat on? Are you nuts, or just unaware of how SL tends to work. This would break holovendors, it would mean you have 5 seconds to get into your car, that your follower pet dies instantly, that the nifty fireflies die before their particle texture even loads... yeah, no. Bad idea, totally breaks object utility.

Deal with the downtime. I'd rather have SL with asshats than a neutered 3D IRC with asshats. The griefers are here to stay, regardless of how many useful scripting tools you break in trying to get rid of them. There are asshats on IRC, Telnet locations, UT, Counterstrike, whatever. SL merely makes them have to be slightly creative to be pricks.

I don't understand this odd concept of focus on individual users and limiting them in one artificial way or another, when it's the overall state of a sim/grid affected by actions of multiple users, that actually is the issue.

Each sim is able to get fairly good idea about its own state (fps, time dillation, amount of objects active, etc and so on) ... can't there be simple sanity check put in when the rez-related commands are invoked, so that when --and _only_ when-- sim is found in state where adding more objects is likely to push the performance down past what's deemed acceptable ... these commands fail?

Yes, it'd mean in heavily overloaded environment some gear would cease to operate, and its scripts would need to take such possibility into account. But since the sim at such point would be already barely running, that's hardly noticeable penalty when the upside is sim not getting pushed past the point of crash... and eventually returning automatically to full functionality when the load is cleared.

It's the physics. The sim dies in a snap. Goes from running fine to fried in a blink.
I've been doing tests for a couple of weeks trying to monitor sim status and shut down vehicles before the sim dies. The fact is all it takes to kill a sim most of the time is a single torus making collisions.

I say we ban the evil torii! Or many get physics that don't suck ass.

Oh you're a cruel one.


Random comment/insight: I have found that it isn't the sim crashes that push the game overboard, it's the people spamming the login server and crashing it when they furiously try to get on that /really/ screws the grid over... just personal observation, really.

Ah`ve seen some hare-brained ideas here, some darn good --if impractical--ideas, an` jes` anout everythin` in between.

This one, however, takes th` cake!

This is the best idea Ah`ve yet seen, ma own included!

Toodle-oo!

No,charge for prims use is stupid...those who own land have already pay for it.You buy X amount of land with a certain amount prim alotment,once you reach that you are done its either time to redo your land or build elsewhere...this one sad,bad damn idea..

I appreciate that you're not doing this to be nasty, but it still makes your land hostile and I won't hang around any area that's like that.
My first parcel is a 4096 with a lot of spare quota next to a sandbox in a furry sim. I figure that makes me a pretty high profile target, and people keep telling me I'm "flirting with disaster". I'm still waiting for the disaster to hit. Worst I've had happen was a bunch of noisemakers left on my land, which took about 10 seconds to return after I logged in.

Oooh, good point.

I've been on islands while these grid attacks have gone on, and there hasn't been a major problem until they took the grid down.

Add this to the list of reasons why the large contiguous mainland is turning into a failed experiment.

Break it up into stretches of no more than 20-30 sims in a chunk. Get llTeleportAgent working transparently for avs and vehicles they're riding and use it to create portals to preserve the illusion of continuity, but don't implement llTeleportObject... and no attack could hit more than a fraction of the grid at once.

I do think setting that as default for new sims is a good idea, personally I think the default for most settings regarding land should be "off".

But some sim owners will still have to and should be able to toggle that option to "on". On ours for instance, we have a shopping center where one of the draws is that vendors don't have to add yet another group to rent. People use the chapels for weddings and need to be able to set out their own wedding cakes or dance ball sets. The honeymoon locations even, people are encouraged to set out what they need to be happy if we haven't already provided it. If we decided to limit our risk and deny people the ability to set out objects, I honestly can't say if it would cut down our business any but for me thats not the point.... I want happy customers and this way makes them happier.

I have to say, as rough enough as it is being a newbie (and yes I remember, I almost didn't stay myself but glad I did now) for the average newbie there really isn't a need to be able to do much in the way of scripting and certainly not advanced scripting such as the self replicating objects. I don't think MOST new people would object much to having to wait a couple of weeks or even a month before they are allowed to do something that advanced.

/108/d9/103693/1.html

I've never used anything self replicating myself so I'm clueless here, but really how common a thing is this? Is it necessary and I've just missed the boat, or is it really only something a small percentage of people use?

Self replicating objects use llRezObject. llRezObject does hundreds of other jobs in SL, as outlined earlier. If you put restrictions on llRezObject then you hurt alot of scripts.

The only 'valid' /self/-replicator I have heard of is those adorable lil breeding eating fish

well i will throw out my own thought so you can yell at me. only allow the regular premium subcribing members to use this kinds of scripts that possibly can cause damages. and only after a probation period of perhaps a couple of months. until they show they are not griefers that way this little idiots can not just keep getting alts and causing damage. at least they will have to pay a little and maybe there is a little rest between attacks ? just my thoughts. Okay...you can start shooting now