A way to stop grid attacks.

I had this strange idea. But what if Linden installed an special option in players menus called "Script Shutdown". "Script Shutdown" would be the SL equivilent of a fire alarm in RL. You only pull it if the situation arises. The Shutdown would kill all scripts in a region, so regions with people in them would not suffer from these attacks. Pushing the button without a reason could be a bannable offense, mabye even a fine.

This has been my 2 cents worth.

Not a bad idea, but what about when the insurgents start pulling the fire alarm for fun?

And people wouldn't abuse this at all. Ever.

Nope.

Yes, abuse would be the only problem with this.

I suppose it's not too bad of an idea. Actually I gotta say it's one of the beter. If anything, anyone who pushes the button can be easily traced(likely easier than griefers). I'd rather have my scripts shut down for a short period rather than having to be kicked out of SL and wait for the Lindens to clean up the mess.

Since a grid wide attack is likely to have muliple witnesses, maybe the "Script Shutdown" aka Panic Button will only go into effect if X number of people have clicked it. That will help reduce abusing it by a single person.

And I gotta say this is WAAAAAYYY better than punishing free users...

Yes all of this has been discussed in other threads...and many good ideas, pros and cons have been discussed. Might be worth a look as this was discussed when this happened Friday into Saturday and now Sunday....I do know that LL does work hard to fix this, but maybe all the publicity given to these attacks just gives others the initiative for their 15 mins. of fame so to speak?

Not sure, maybe a less prolific, less acknowledging these 'terrorists' might be a better modus operandi.

/108/dc/103219/1.html

- W

So, what happens when the scripts come back online? Do we just llReset() all of them, erasing their variables & states, or do we save their state and then re-initialize it?

What about scripts that rely on inter-sim communications with other scripts (email, XML-RPC)? Networked vendors work like this. It could easily break a lot of things there, especially if the *server* was in the effected sim.

Pretty Bad Idea. But better than some, at least (charge money to rez objects? WTF?)

Hm, that's true Darkside. But then again, most things seem to survive total breakage after grid attacks, but I may be wrong there.

But if thing are able to survive the post grid attack fallout, then I think that most things would survive a temporary script halt. If it were to reset the scripts, then yeah, it might cause some harm. If it was possible to save the states and variables of the scripts running, then it might not be so bad.

Even if this went into effect, I bet the Lindens would have to bring down the grid to investigate/clean up. But I think that if the script halter were to shut down the attack before it overwhelmed the server's too much, the downtime will probably be a lot shorter.

So far, I think this is the best idea I've seen so far...

it used to be that way, instead of a prim limit you got taxed for rezzing stuff

Yeah. We call those the "bad old days", AKA, "the stupidist idea in the history of SL".