Early on in the history of the game, player Randy Farmer made an invisible repeating auto-cannon that fired a hundred rounds per minute and teleported people away, just to illustrate what could be done with the scripting tools available. He could have been much nastier with his creation, but chose to limit the gun's abilities. Since then, there have been occasional reports of this kind of "griefing" (in-game player harassment) done with scripted objects, but the denial of service to the game itself is the first major event of this type.
Randy Farmer is one of the inventors of avatars. His Resident name is Oracle Omega--check the 1st Life part of his profile. He is also a founding father of Habitat, an online world before SL, and to all Residents interested in the future of SL, I can recommend no finer read than "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat". Randy also helped design an earlier SL user interface, 1.2 I think.
Now, this is a fascinating piece of trivia I hadn't heard before. I was looking for references to it, but didn't find any in the SL History Wiki or here on the SL Forums.
Is there anyone who was around back then who has more stories about what happened with this particular device?
I say thankee.
