SL Insurgency Attacks Increasing in Frequency

Despite the capture and execution of Plastic Duck, the SL insurgency movement has not been critically wounded. Rather, it seems to be gaining speed and conducting attacks with greater frequency and intensity than before.

Are the insurgents organizing themselves better? Have they been able to attract more malcontents than at any other previous point in SL history? What are the reasons behind this spike in insurgency attacks?

Just as the President is struggling to come up with a solution to win the fighting in Iraq, I imagine Philip is struggling to get handle on SL-insurgency.

Has the time of self-policing come? This way, SL citizens could take down an insurgent before he is able to detonate any grid crashing scripts.

What say you, the community, about the increase in SL grid attacks we've been seeing?

1 word. Resmod

Two words. Forums only.


That doesn't really help much now, does it.

The number of attacks is climbing to an unacceptable level.

Also, the attacks are probably affecting in world business.

I meant, imagine the hatred the boards goers have shown towards the res mods, and now make them have power actually in SL....

I think Linden Labs should commence a pre-emptive strike on There, followed by Activeworlds.

I think the attacks are happening more often because of two very simple reasons.

It's easy.

People are getting away with it.

And that leaves us, and LL, with a Real Big Problem... because neither of those are easy to deal with.

Ease of attack... well, LL can make substantial changes to game infrastructure. Substantial enough that everyone will be ranting and screaming because of the changes, just like they're ranting and screaming because of the attacks. Those changes might alter, say, LSL functionality sufficiently to damage enjoyment of SL for some people. Those changes might remove features that residents are taking for granted. No quick fix, and no harmless fix, and people are screaming the ageless cry of the immature and over-entitled: 'NOW NOW NOW!'.

People getting away with it... well. You can, possible, made a case for a denial of service attack. Given that SL is going to be perceived as a game by any investigating authority, it's not going to be taken very seriously. Also, what if the asshats taking the grid down live in Johannesburg, or Tokyo, or Jakarta, or Rio? The FBI doesn't have jurisdiction there.

Me personally, I think it will get worse before it gets better. I hope the Lindens come up with a solution that makes everyone happy, but I'm not holding my breath. And the thing that bothers me most about all this is, it's all happening because some mouthbreathing goobers think breaking stuff is funny. The same morons who thought firecracker + kitten was the height of comedy in sixth grade.

The only consolation I take out of this is, the jackasses responsible are who they are, and in all honesty, that's not something I'd wish on most people.

But they don't appear to care. I'm not saying they don't - either personally or professionally - just that they don't seem to.

Outside of apologies and rather vain "we're working with the authorities" statements, has anyone seen any indication that they are working on a solution, or should we just expect this to happen a couple of times a week?

I want to be mistaken; I want to have missed a "we are doing X to work toward mitigating this". This is an honest question, any pointers would be appreciated.

Incidentally, I think "insurgency" bespeaks some coordination or conspiracy that just isn't there, as if a graffitti covered wall was a planned group action instead of a bunch of individuals acting independently because the wall is there and they have paint and are bored.

I assume that they are working toward some kind of solution; any other attitude is, simply, financial suicide. They provide a service, that service is being compromised by the actions of <insert derogatory term of your choice here>, and if they allow the service to continue being disrupted, they will no longer be given money by their subscribers. I could be mistaken... there have been, and are, businesses that simply don't care whether or not the public is satisfied with their service. Those businesses tend to not do well for themselves, and a small one like LL lives and dies by the amount of attention they pay to customer satisfaction. As far as not being given any indication that they are working on a solution... I'm betting that right now they're trying to decide which segment of their customer base to piss off. Which feature to remove or alter, to make grid takedowns harder. If I were them, I'd be reluctant to start posting 'Okay, we're working on it, and man are you guys going to be upset', too.

And I don't much think this is some sort of conspiracy; there are just way too many people out there who're just bright enough to copy script into an object, and who giggle when they tear the wings off a fly... that's the combination we're most likely looking at. Dim and amused when something breaks.

funniest thing said today!

I think they'll fix it when it's becomes unbearable. When it's a real problem then that's when the programmer who fixes it will feel appreciated and will be rewarded with love.

I'm not making fun of LL here. I'd not want to tackle this problem until I was sure my efforts would be appreciated.

Surely it's easy enough to just detect a sharp increase in the amount of objects rezzable in any one sim at the same time?

Even in a sandbox, it's highly unlikely that any user is going to legitimately want to replicate, say, 500 items, time and time again, so any region that detects an increase of prims suddenly can just shut down prim creation for, say 30 seconds.

I know that something similar already works because a while ago a friend showed me a machine gun he'd bought which threw out temp on rez bullet shells. He fired this for about 20 seconds until there were about 1000 shells in a heap on the floor around him, then he got an error message saying there were no more prims available; I had a similar problem with some disco lights which would flash on and off, because of the speed they were flashing I actually filled up a 'buffer' of deleted objects and kept getting error messages about being unable to create the prim of light.

We can't remove the idiots behind the attacks, because there will always be new ones. We can't really kill the scripting behind it as it has a number of legitimate uses. That only leaves us with 'prim creation throttling' to restrict the amount of objects created, and that will at least slow it down - so when a number of sims report at the same time that this level has been hit, it can alert someone who can perhaps throw up one of those 'firewalls' that contained an earlier attack so well.

It's a shame that time and resources has to be wasted on such things.

Lewis

It's easy to detect a sudden increase in prims being rezzed. But it's not easy to detect the owner's intentions. They might have a fancy script that creates an house for them. Or an automated fence maker. Who knows?

Perhaps a sim could be programmed to monitor chat. If somebody uses certain greifer associated words like "L333t" then it can adjust their trust rating appropriately. If their trust rating reaches a dangerous level then the sim will refuse to rez items for them?

Just an idea!

I think LL should buy AW and There and close em'. Then they should free Tibet, build a moonbase, and bring back New Coke.

(actually that whole thing was sarcasim.)

Then by all means, let's panic. Let's compare these attacks on a recreational product to global religious, political, and nationalist conspiracies involving the lives and deaths of millions of people and the flow of trillions of dollars in capital. Then let's mimic the effects of these attacks ourselves, by discussing ways to eliminate or interfere with the rights, privileges, business, and fun of thousands of residents, inworld and outside, because of the adolescent antics of a few.

If we were self-governing, we could create hundreds of committees, manufacture a blizzard of propaganda, and stage show-trials and show-wars. As it is, however, I guess we'll have to be content with forum-drama.

This was exactly my first thought. I doubt there's an even semi-organized group plotting to overthrow the grid with self-replicating prims. Suggesting that this is the case lends them a legitimacy that they do not deserve. I think the more likely case is that many of these attacks are the work of copycat script kiddy types.

Someone needs to cut down on his Fox News intake.

Not all DoS attacks are done by 'script kiddies'. Nowadays many are done as a part of an extortion campaign. Online betting sites are frequently targetted. And, as SL is becoming a lucrative little environment, sooner or later one online extortion gang or another will attempt to target SL. That doesn't bode well but it's part of life. And I can't think of any solutions off the top of my head.