02-26-2003 12:00
Summary:
- On Tuesday, 2/25 we released a new version of the Second Life software.
- A bug was found immediately that caused certain objects to go public.
- This bug was temporarily patched and the "state" of the world was restored.
- A new version will be released today.



Dear Second Life Closed Beta Residents,

Yesterday we released a new version of the Second Life software. The new version, (v. 0.4.0) is the result of many suggestions by our closed beta residents, and the hard work of our programmers.

Exciting new features include:
- long hair
- attachments saved in outfits
- notecards can now contain landmarks, textures and objects
- new color picker for clothing and textures
- objects can decay to public to prevent unused clutter

The system by which objects decay has taken the most amount of effort to design/program/test. Since Second Life is a user-driven space full of amazing creations we are particularly focused on any features which impacts resident content.

During open hours yesterday, we were notified that a number of items had decayed to public and were being deleted by community members. This was due to a programming bug (explained in greater detail below).

We have temporarily disabled the object decay and will re-enable it once we have tested it more thoroughly. Please note that we have "restored" the Second Life world to the state saved at 9:00am PST, prior to the release of the new software. Any objects built between 4:00pm PST and 6:00pm PST will need to be rebuilt. Objects in your inventory and your account balance will not be impacted.

Once we re-enable the system of object decay, all residents should be very aware of the new rules regarding Objects on Public Land posted in the Announcements.

A new version of the software (v. 0.4.1) will be released today before 4:00pm.

We apologize for any inconvenience that may have been caused, and thank the may people who found the bug early enough that we were able to solve it quickly.

Best Wishes,

-Linden Lab and the Second Life team


Details here:

Series of events:
4:00pm PST, Second Life opens
5:00pm PST, We receive reports that some items have gone public. It isn't clear if these are objects that were public before, or owned objects on public land.
5:30 - Examination of the logs shows that owned objects are decaying to public. The process appears to have started in the morning.
5:45 - Linden Lab warns all residents that they were going to shut down the grid, turn off public object decay, and roll the content back to the previous state.
6:00 - The users in Second Life are warned that the grid will be shut down.
6:05 - Linden Lab finds the bug. It is related to the conversion of time from seconds to microseconds. Remember the meters/feet conversion error that caused NASA to lose a very expensive piece of equipment on the surface of Mars? It's kind-of like that only related to time. Fortunately, we can get the object back. Not so with NASA. Aren't virtual worlds cool like that?
6:10 - Linden Lab patches the code to turn off public object decay after deciding that we wanted more time to test the fix.
6:20 - Linden Lab takes Second Life offline temporarily.
6:30 - The world "state" from 9:00am is restored to the grid.
6:55 - Second Life is reopened.