Self Replication & "The Grid"
|
|
Argent Stonecutter
Emergency Mustelid
Join date: 20 Sep 2005
Posts: 20,263
|
04-29-2006 13:07
From: Adam Zaius If LL were to consider changing the default land parcel permissions from 'other can build', to 'others cant build' - and then allowed users to toggle it (as it can be done now), then vaste swathes of the mainland would be unbuildable - this would significantly impede the progress of any out of control replicator, since each unbuildable parcel acts like a barrier wall against the oncoming flood. How do you figure? An object at 2000 meters can travel arbitrarily fast, and even without self-rep a pre-loaded multi-level superhive could drop a hive in every sim in SL in a matter of minutes... and constructing the superhive with the editing tools wouldn't take much longer. |
|
Argent Stonecutter
Emergency Mustelid
Join date: 20 Sep 2005
Posts: 20,263
|
04-29-2006 13:12
From: Adam Zaius Border crossings for physical objects without an agent sitting on them are unreliable at best. In high load doubly so. At 2000 meters pretty much none of the problems with border crossings are an issue any more. And the hives can use a temp-on-rez intermediate generation to ignore the build limits in spawn points... at 2000 meters they can spread over hundreds of sims at a time and still survive long enough to drop a daughter hive. From: someone Basically setting no-build as the default will over the long term make SL a good deal more hostile There's all kinds of things that are part of what make SL "cool" and worth spending time in that sepend on the ability to rez objects. SO, yes, changing no-build to the default will make SL a good deal more hostile. |
|
Ordinal Malaprop
really very ordinary
Join date: 9 Sep 2005
Posts: 4,607
|
04-29-2006 13:23
I was just wondering about how many levels of replication it takes to effect a crash anyway.
I mean, obviously self-replication is the easiest way, but really, it wouldn't take long to build something that had the same effect as ten or twenty levels of it, and each level could rez child objects faster as well.
|
|
Adam Zaius
Deus
Join date: 9 Jan 2004
Posts: 1,483
|
04-29-2006 14:04
From: Argent Stonecutter And the hives can use a temp-on-rez intermediate generation to ignore the build limits in spawn points... I dont believe that is the case, nor do objects at 2000m move any faster than ones at 0m. MoveToTarget is limited to 64m/0.2sec, ApplyImpulse can be faster, but when you are sending lots at a time, or the system is under load, it tends to 'drop' objects - even still, it makes transport significantly more difficult than the current "just rez anywhere" that we have now. The larger the distances between rez points, the harder it is going to be to 'infect' the whole grid, and the less prims to work with (although temp on rez will bypass that particular limit) |
|
Adam Zaius
Deus
Join date: 9 Jan 2004
Posts: 1,483
|
04-29-2006 14:05
From: Darkness Anubis Actually when we were in Jouppi before we got the island there was one of these attacks (I am thinking it was right before 1.7 was released but it might have been 1.  . Our land ALWAYS has a 1 min autoreturn and no build. we were overrun in no time. The balls with the evil face just bounced in from neighboring lands. Sorry to shot your idea in the foot but it just didn't work for us. Did you have the whole sim set this way? If part of a sim is buildable, then that area is open to spread it elsewhere. Ditto for neighbouring parcels in other sims. |
|
Adam Zaius
Deus
Join date: 9 Jan 2004
Posts: 1,483
|
04-29-2006 14:06
From: Nexus Nash Good solution, it's that or make it so that llRez only works on own land... which would suck. A anti-self-replication change was made a few versions back (Objects cant pass inventory to other objects unless you own the land under them), it broke a lot of things and was rolled back pretty quickly. Problem with most of these solutions is that they kill functionality - something I personally would rather not see. |
|
Ralph Doctorow
Registered User
Join date: 16 Oct 2005
Posts: 560
|
I still like watching prim creation rate
04-29-2006 14:51
So why not implement my earlier suggestion of watching the rate of prim creation in every sim? The main characteristic of these grid floods is rapid and accelerating prim creation, so look for that directly.
Use spikes in the rate of creation to trigger more resource costly measures such as checking if the objects are on the owner's land, are they being rezed by agents or objects, is the owner in the FIC, etc. There are lots of possible tests for grid attacks. If the current situation doesn't pass the tests, slow down or stop the creation rate and the handoff of prims to other sims. Actually, it might make sense to immediately slow things down while the tests are being performed.
Even if the method of spread was to first slowly disperse a set of hives across the grid, then trigger the infestation from multiple points simultaneously, this would scale. Each sim would independently notice that the prim creation rate was going up fast and could throttle it and prevent spread to other sims.
This would also be an automatic alarm mechanism that could be used to notify LL if things looked dicey.
|
|
Adam Zaius
Deus
Join date: 9 Jan 2004
Posts: 1,483
|
04-29-2006 15:13
From: Ralph Doctorow So why not implement my earlier suggestion of watching the rate of prim creation in every sim? The main characteristic of these grid floods is rapid and accelerating prim creation, so look for that directly.
Use spikes in the rate of creation to trigger more resource costly measures such as checking if the objects are on the owner's land, are they being rezed by agents or objects, is the owner in the FIC, etc. There are lots of possible tests for grid attacks. If the current situation doesn't pass the tests, slow down or stop the creation rate and the handoff of prims to other sims. Actually, it might make sense to immediately slow things down while the tests are being performed.
Even if the method of spread was to first slowly disperse a set of hives across the grid, then trigger the infestation from multiple points simultaneously, this would scale. Each sim would independently notice that the prim creation rate was going up fast and could throttle it and prevent spread to other sims.
This would also be an automatic alarm mechanism that could be used to notify LL if things looked dicey. On a per-sim basis that might not be a bad idea. (ie; owner rez delay = X / 3, where X is the number of objects you have rezzed in the last 10 minutes) |
|
Darkside Eldrich
Registered User
Join date: 10 Feb 2006
Posts: 200
|
04-29-2006 17:26
From: Simon Nolan I guess I'm kinda looking at this from an OOP standpoint, where an object could create an instance of itself. A simple local variable in the parent class could hold a generation count when the object is instantiated, and be set in the child object when the parent object instantiates a copy of itself. Now, I don't know if that's anywhere near how objects self-replicate in SL, but that seems to be different from a vendor object instantiating a different object--not itself. Self-replication basics (as I understand it): 1. The self-replicating object, we'll call it Frank, contains 2 things in it's inventory: a replication script, and another "Frank", with the replication script inside. 2. The script calls llRezObject and rezzes the copy of Frank it *contains* somewhere nearby. We'll call him "FrankNew". Note that he has the script, but NOT another copy of himself. 3. The original Frank gives FrankNew a copy of the stored Frank with llGiveInventory. 4. Goto 1. Example here: http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=ExampleSelfReplication |
|
Christopher Omega
Oxymoron
Join date: 28 Mar 2003
Posts: 1,828
|
04-29-2006 20:45
Instead of defaulting new land holdings to no-build (or toggling everyone's settings to no-build), I'd be more inclined to support the implementation of a new land permission, no-script-rez, that causes calls to llRezObject to silently fail in objects not owned by the owner of the parcel. This can facilitate a sort of compromise that allows explorers to freely build and edit on land (hence preserving the 'naturally open' feel of SL) yet limits self-replicating scripts.
It would also be less controversial if LL implemented it and set it to on by default.
==Chris
|
|
SuezanneC Baskerville
Forums Rock!
Join date: 22 Dec 2003
Posts: 14,229
|
04-29-2006 21:25
Perhaps it would be possible to make the no-script-rez like in Christopher's idea be scriptable - so folks who want could have a script that, for example, sets their land to no-outside-script-rezzing when they go offline, without them needing to remember to set it off and on.
_____________________
-
So long to these forums, the vBulletin forums that used to be at forums.secondlife.com. I will miss them.
I can be found on the web by searching for "SuezanneC Baskerville", or go to
http://www.google.com/profiles/suezanne
-
http://lindenlab.tribe.net/ created on 11/19/03.
Members: Ben, Catherine, Colin, Cory, Dan, Doug, Jim, Philip, Phoenix, Richard,
Robin, and Ryan
-
|
|
Argent Stonecutter
Emergency Mustelid
Join date: 20 Sep 2005
Posts: 20,263
|
04-30-2006 07:46
From: Adam Zaius I dont believe that is the case, nor do objects at 2000m move any faster than ones at 0m. Objects at 2000m can move faster, because they can use physical movement without having to worry about falling through the land and going off-grid, or colliding with skyboxes. But let's use your figure. 64m/0.2s lets you cross a sim in 0.8s. That means a temp-on-rez intermediate object can reach any sim on the Attoll continent and drop a secondary hive there before it derezzes. That's plenty fast enough. I'm not going into the details, but it should be pretty obvious how you could have a primary hive rez hundreds of temp-on-rez transporters a second, and get at least one secondary hive on every sim in Atoll on less than five minutes. That would be more than enough to take the grid down. |
|
Adam Zaius
Deus
Join date: 9 Jan 2004
Posts: 1,483
|
04-30-2006 12:57
Well, at ground level, you can just set status phantom while moving.
This is something I'd love to be able to test on preview to see if it is or isnt enough of a solution - however - the angle I'm putting is that the combination of factors (including the need to search for buildable land, autoreturn, unreliable, delayed border crossings, etc) is enough to thwart sustained replication - or at least slow it down enough that LL can deal with it.
Right now, sustained replication is possible at any scale, at any speed, with very simple code - and that is, as apparent by the recent attacks - somewhat of a problem.
|