Linden Labs doing everything they can?

Maklin strikes me as extremely selfish. I would like to see SL "fixed" (if that were possible, which I doubt given the open-ended nature of the game) for everyone BUT him. Since he doesn't care about anyone else's experience and would happily ruin theirs just to make his better, poetic justice would see only his experience ruined instead.

As for the poll, I voted "yes." Next time, try making a poll with real choices.

And the lindens do exactly WHAT about it? Platitudes and 4-6 hr cleanups...but no preventions. No prosecutions (and they should modify TOS to allow revealing character names and what punishments were inflicted...they hide behind tos on downtime). Their lack of fixes and lack of serious enough deterrent punishments makes them as equally culpable as the nitwit that crashed the grid.

And no, I understand the issue. I understand when WoW finds something a player can do to cheat (dupe) or destabilize a server, they damn well fix the problem even if the players bitch and whine about features being removed or nerfed. And they have removed entire guilds of troublemakers....but LL tolerates the groups from a certain website that have (at least once in the past) had members causing problems. LL makes no effort to rectify the problem or compensate the premium players...WoW does.

LL is too busy genuflecting to the ingame capitalists and coders and won't do squat to fix the problem because it might make people mad if their flashy swords stopped being lagmakers.

...I agree, however your asserting that this is a "purely technical problem" which it simply is not, which makes your entire point invalid. Any changes to how the grid or lsl works impacts every single person on the grid. Usually in ways they don't even forsee. Remember the backlash when they stopped allowing objects to give other objects inventory? Now imagine if they put a limiter on rezzing objects from inventory, many weapons would simply be destroyed, some flight accelerators, "holo" vendors, all sorts of innocent bystanders would be gone. For example, I have this amazing sword, that will create 32 particle emitters that flow around me causing an amazing looking cherry blossom petal effect. Since there is no way for the asset server to track "generation" of items, things like this are simply undistinguishable from an object that will cause havoc accross the grid. And now your problary thinking "then why not have it start tracking generation" this is where the fact that I said it cannot be done without a significant change to the current system. When you rez an object, it's not tracked by the asset server anymore, it's tracked by the sim that it's on. Tracking generation is simply impossible without getting rid of the central asset server, which is not a minor change, and would open a whole new bag of worms, like seperate sim asset server crashes, which could be even more damaging to inventories.

Well, I still bet if a 'real terrorist' was using that card, he/she'd be at Guantanamo already.

But in this case, too, I don't think it's too hard to trace the card to a person. It is, after all, the point of credit cards to have everyone and every purchase in a database, so everyone can be traced anytime.

I understand your point, but not every solution requires drastic changes as in the existing function breaking examples you cited.

Just to throw out a simple example of how this could be done without affecting the structure of the asset DB or gimping LSL. The "grey goo" attacks have a feature that could be exploited to detect and abate them - unlike the legitimate examples you cited above, the grid attacks lack locality of rezzing. One can imagine a meta-process that watches the asset rezzing and looks for patterns of rapid non-local rezzing.

This is similar to the heuristic used to stop TCP SYN flood DoS attacks that were threatening the entire internet by exploiting a flaw in the 1970s TCP protocol designed in an era relatively free of hostile crackers. If a network device sees a sharp spike in SYNs left dangling, they assume that a SYN flood is being mounted and start discarding SYNs from the originating addresses. Thus the response is targeted and kicks in only after detecting a known pattern of attack and affects only the originating machines. True, this also may cause a DoS of legitimate traffic from those addresses, but it is preferable to having all connections fail because some rogue machines are mounting an overload.

Have I proven here (or to myself) that this will fix it? Nope. Does it stand a decent chance of mitigating it? I think so.

A couple years ago I stumbled across a nice google hack that permitted anyone searching the right combination of numbers to find oodles and oodles of credit card numbers, names, and any other info you might want. Some people may remember this little bug. If I'd been a much worse person, I would have a big screen TV, a really nice car, and some gold capped teeth right now. And lots of fake SL accounts.


But I'm that bad a person....most of the time.

It's really easy to bitch and complain when you don't understand the facts. Sure i'm not happy the grid is down, however since I know how the system works and it's vulnerabilities I don't flip out and start calling the lindens incompetent. I get pissed at the moron who released the item, not start demanding LL cripples the game to prevent stuff like this from happening.

You're EXACTLY the kind of CONSUMER businesses love. Always willing to make excuses for them, to be unhappy but not at them. I still remember the time when folks DEMANDED service, not rationalized and defended poor performance.

Down is down, whether they pull the plug or a player causes the crash. If they pull the plug for an exploit, the exploit is their responsibility due to poor programming and QA. If the game goes down because of a player, its their responsibility for not coding to prevent such occurances. Yes, in both cases, the exploiter and the global attacker share responsibility (they found the bug / hole)...but the companies BOTH are to blame for providing the mechanism. Its how they respond to it that counts, and LL just apologizes and goes on like nothing happened...that is why I blame LL.

A couple years ago I stumbled across a nice google hack that permitted anyone searching the right combination of numbers to find oodles and oodles of credit card numbers, names, and any other info you might want. Some people may remember this little bug. If I'd been a much worse person, I would have a big screen TV, a really nice car, and some gold capped teeth right now. And lots of fake SL accounts.

This is similar to the heuristic used to stop TCP SYN flood DoS attacks that were threatening the entire internet by exploiting a flaw in the 1970s TCP protocol designed in an era relatively free of hostile crackers. If a network device sees a sharp spike in SYNs left dangling, they assume that a SYN flood is being mounted and start discarding SYNs from the originating addresses.