"Massive" Amazon Server Troubles Take Down Much of Internet

 

 If you've had some trouble online today, you're far from alone. Various Internet services from Snapchat to Netflix to Reddit and were down, and many others had problems because of an Amazon Web Services server outage. The trouble supposedly started today, Monday October 20, at 2:40 AM EST, possibly at one of their largest datacenters in northern Virginia. There were supposedly "over 1,000 businesses impacts, including many banks." The total damage done may be in the billions of dollars. 

 

Second Life was affected as well, the Grid Status report showing "A service provider for Second Life is currently experiencing an outage which is affecting the Destinations page: secondlife.com/destinations/" Search was affected as well. A couple friends told me they had problems getting on. 

 

Supposedly the data engineers have taken care of the trouble, though this is a reminder of how many companies use Amazon servers, and what can happen when something big goes wrong. 

 

Sources, CNN, Techradar 

 

Bixyl Shuftan 

 

EOTB: Linden Lab Acknowledges Some Residents Are Having PBR Related Issues

 

If you've been having issues with the viewer in Second Life since the PBR (Physical Based Rendering) updates, you're not alone. Numbers of people have complained since it's introduction of increased lag, longer rezzing times, and crashes.

 

In their latest post on the official blog, Linden Lab was basically acknowledging there was a problem,  

We are always striving to add more improvements to Second Life and we’ve been particularly excited to roll out integration of PBR Materials, which has the potential to improve and modernize much of the look and feel of our virtual world. However, the introduction of PBR has not gone as smoothly as we would like and we have heard community frustrations and feedback with recent PBR-enabled Viewer releases of both the Official Second Life Viewer and Firestorm Viewer.

We share your frustration and are taking steps to make things better for everyone on both lower-end and high-end systems. This means that we’re actively focused on improving the performance in a variety of areas including improved FPS, VRAM management, texture loading, alpha blending, and even how lighting is rendered within the world. Additional fixes are already in our development pipeline and will head to QA soon.

Of what to do, the Lab suggested that those using the Linden Viewer download this update (link).

If you are having issues with the Official Second Life Viewer, you can immediately download an update here that addresses many of the issues affecting performance, particularly among those who may be using older or less powerful computers. We are continuing to work on additional fixes that will further address texture loading issues and low framerates. If you don’t update proactively now, you’ll soon see a prompt when you go to login to Second Life in the coming days encouraging you to update. 

 

For those using Firestorm, the Lab stated, "We are working closely with the Firestorm team to coordinate the rollout of updates that will improve your performance." They would mention that Team Firestorm made the decision to keep their last pre-PBR viewer around indefinitely .

 

The next release of the Firestorm viewer will include all the performance fixes we are working on. You’ll be prompted to update your Firestorm Viewer once it is ready in the next few days, but you can also be one of the first to try it by joining the Firestorm Preview Group inworld and continue to stay connected with their development progress on the official Firestorm Viewer website and its dedicated download page.

For the blogpost in full, Click Here. 

Bixyl Shuftan

Firestorm PBR Viewer Online

 

 Last week on Thursday June 20, Firestorm announced on their blog that their latest viewer version, the 6.6.17 viewer, was out, one that could view PBR (Physical Based Rendering) content. This includes some high detail content, and mirror surfaces. 

It is time! After nearly seven months of testing and seeking bug fixes and merging improvements and features, we are unleashing the Firestorm PBR viewer today. PBR was first released by Linden Lab back in November 2023. We have been working with them to help ensure that bugs and glitches in those early releases were addressed before we passed it on. Since then many improvements have been made, not just in the performance and stability but with new features such as realistic mirrors and better terrain. It is now time to pass all that on, and we felt that there was no better occasion to do this than just before the SL21B celebrations, where—I have been told by someone who got an early insight—”some of the best builds I have ever seen in Second Life” have been created.

 

They listed a "timeline of release notes and updates" to help keep track of what features were under development and when.

I downloaded the new viewer, and I went to a place where there was some PBR content: The Shop and Hop. The hallways separating the sims, I had noticed panels with wavy gray patterns before. With the new Firestorm viewer, they took shape as leafy plants. 

 

Someone (I forget the name) pointed out a place where I could see a PBR mirror. I went there, and I went to my Preferences and made sure "Mirrors" were active. And it worked. 

But, it wasn't perfect. Lag seemed to be slightly worse, and I couldn't get water surfaces to reflect. Firestorm admitted there would be problems for many, "This is a big step."

I don’t want to underplay the enormity of this change from the 6.6.17 viewer. The visual experience will be drastically different, and for some, it will take some getting used to. The hardware demands will be quite different, too, and you will have to make some (sometimes significant) changes to your “normal settings” to get the best out of your experience.

A lot of why we have held back is to try to get ahead of many of the bug fixes and issues that we knew would dominate the support teams time. While this release is certainly a lot more stable than early PBR viewers and I would say it is probably as stable as any previous viewer, the bugs and annoyances that you will experience will be different and new, and people naturally worry about this. Our support team will be working very hard to help you all through this transition ...

And bugs there were. The very first to comment wrote, "Being on an older computer it was horrific, more useless SL bells and whistles..." another went "I am going to be perfectly and brutally honest, its worst. From what I have seen the settings are changed into a way that the reflections became more unreal then before, the water is horrible" A marketing manager for a boat show wrote, "this is just AWFUL. What terrible timing. ALL the vendor’s semi-transparent sails are now ruined and need to be redone... the water is purple, and the foliage all has a blue-purple fringe at the transparent edges ... Worse yet, I had to clear my cache to get my slide-show textures to load and finally display properly. And, of course, the average attendee doesn’t have the skills to get into their settings to clear the cache or turn down settings to even make the boat show remotely viable."

Two friends of mine reported trouble. One told me she experienced bad lag at the SL21B, worse than last year, and when looking at another friend's PBR mirror she crashed. Former Newser writer Grease Coakes told me he had so much trouble crashing at the SL21B trying to play music, and had problems going back to May, he made the decision to leave SL with no plans on coming back.

So it seems we have a viewer update with much to offer. But it seems work to fix the bugs is needed. 

Readers with problems (and praises) are encouraged to make a comment below.

Bixyl Shuftan

 

Daniel Voyager's Blog On Hiatus

 

Noted SL blogger Daniel Voyager hasn't been doing well. It's been several weeks since his blog, Daniel Voyager's Blog, published an article.  Taking a look at his Twitter, it seems he's been dealing with some real life issues that will take some time to resolve. In his last post, he expressed hope at being active again sometime in June.

Best of luck Daniel, and hope you'll be back soon.
 

Reader Submitted: The Cloud Move

Kἶէმƈεlἶმ Lմἶղƈօɾἶმlօէε Kεlνმɾl (Kitacelia Resident) recently sent a reader submitted commentary about what she feels has become quite an aggravating problem: increasing lag along with bugs and glitches due to Linden Lab moving data from it's current servers to cloud-based ones. The Lab's "good idea," from her point of view, is causing a lot of problems. So she took the time to explain the problem as she sees it.

Read Kitacelia's reader submission in Extra.

High Fidelity Fading Away

When the Newser last wrote about High Fidelity in July, the company was in trouble, having laid of a quarter of it's staff and made other cutbacks. But these moves failed to turn things around and the situation has continued to go downhill. Today, while High Fidelity isn't dead yet, it certainly seems close.

Earlier this month, Philip Rosedale, the co-founder of the company, had an announcement titled "Updates and a New Beginning," which had some bad news for fans of the virtual world platform. Among the things announced, High Fidelity was going to "turn over control of the codebase to the community. As of January 15, 2020, we’re going to make High Fidelity’s Github repository private. We want to give community leaders time to create their own repositories and systems as desired."

There were more layoffs announced, "we will reduce our team size in half effective today."

All High Fidelity applications are being removed from online stores and no further accounts are being created, "we’ll also be withdrawing our apps on the Steam Store, Oculus Store and our Virtual You: 3D Avatar Creator app from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Since there are no High Fidelity supported environments, we’re not offering registration for new accounts which these enable."

Taking a look at a "User FAQ" page on the forum, High Fidelity's Marketplace is closing, and there will soon be no more cashout's of the virtual currency, "The Marketplace will close. The public Marketplace pages will be removed, you will not be able to purchase new items, you will not be able to add new items available for sale, and you will not be able to edit existing items’ details. We will also no longer offer cash-out of HFC after January 15, 2020."

Philip Linden felt that the reason for High Fidelity's failure to succeed was that virtual reality had yet to take off due to technical limitations that had yet to be solved, "four fundamental advances in hardware need to happen before HMDs replace mobile and desktop general-computing use. Until VR headsets don’t feel like, as The New Yorker’s Patricia Marx puts it, “a gerbil’s casket [has] been plastered onto the upper half of my face,” compelling social virtual worlds won’t gain traction. So where does that leave High Fidelity?"

Philip's parting words to High Fidelity's users were, "Your passion and dedication to the possibilities of VR and virtual worlds is inspiring. We’re grateful for your support over the years and hope you’ll try out our new product once launched." But the reaction by some users was quite negative. In the forums, one thread was, "Never Forgive, Never Forget," the poster remarking, "I call on the community to never forget the actions of High Fidelity corporate. How they have treated their users and how they have treated their employees. If or when High Fidelity comes out with their next project or a updated version of this project. We should remind High Fidelity of their past and educate their perspectives users of their past. Philip we do not forget. We do not forgive." But not everyone was so critical, DrFran saying, "I don’t know about you, but when people constantly criticize, belittle, and second guess everything you do, you tend to distance yourself from therm. I think HiFi realized the toxicity of the user base, and had to decamp. I don’t blame them for their actions. Their ball; their game."

Ryan Schultz commented of the announcement, "High Fidelity will soon be a dead platform, the first major victim of the social VR wars (but probably not the last). R.I.P." Hamlet Au's assessment was more optimistic, "High Fidelity's underlying code can still be developed by the community under an open source license. ... This seems to open up the possibility of the High Fidelity virtual world becoming the basis for... OpenSim 2." One of High Fidelity's users, Theanie, had his comments, "I ... am not in a state of mourning. The High Fidelity code is thankfully open source, and that means the platform will never really 'die.' There are already multiple forked projects in the works that could prove to be viable successors to the now-defunct platform. However, before we can move on toward that bright virtual future that awaits us, it’s critical to spend time on reflection. As the old saying goes, “Those that don’t learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them.” We need to analyze the mistakes that were made, so as to prevent them from happening again."

In any event, the sun is setting for what was the next virtual world made by the man whom led the building of Second Life.

Bixyl Shuftan

High Fidelity in Trouble

With so much going on in Second Life, it's easy to miss what's going on with other virtual worlds. But there have been reports that one particular one that a number of residents have heard of has been having serious troubles: High Fidelity.

For those of you not familiar with the virtual world, after Philip Rosedale, the founder of Linden Lab, left the company, he went on to found High Fidelity in 2013. Despite having raised over seventy million from investors, it hasn't been doing well. In a community meeting in early April, Rosedale had some bad news. All company owned domains in the virtual world would be shut down, except for the orientation room for new users, and instead of focusing on VR headset experiences they would be concentrating on those from desktop computers. The reason for the latter was slow VR equipment sales. Hamlet Au remarked, "I can't emphasize enough how huge a blow this is to social VR and consumer-facing VR in general." In May came another announcement, a quarter of the workers would be laid off. The company would also be changing it's direction more to businesses.

As part of the changes in April, the General Assembly meetings were replayed with monthly Developers Discussion. When blogger Ryan Schultz looked at the video for the June discussion, he noticed a significant drop in attendance compared to the April meeting. "what happened to all the people who were active supporters of High Fidelity and who used to come out to meetings?" he asked. He then noticed on the forums some longtime members had their "trusted member" status downgraded to standard, which did not sit well with some, "Wow, after being here for 5+ years, I guess I never was trusted at all." Schultz's reaction was, "Is it just me, or is there a general overall sense of HiFi turning off the lights, shutting down various systems, and in general just downgrading services to their loyal userbase?"

If those weren't enough signs of trouble, in late May High Fidelity began offering it's office in San Francisco up for rent. All of this point to signs that of a company, and virtual world, in jeopardy. The name of Schults's blog post "Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" might have been a pessimistic assessment, but hardly unjustified. Despite Philip Rosedale's success with Linden Lab and Second Life, he's been unable to recreate it with his new company and virtual world, leading one to comment, "Second Life must have been a strange anomaly, that neither its founders nor the current Linden Lab appear able to replicate."

Sources: Wikipedia, New World Notes, Ryan Schultz, Crunchbase

Bixyl Shuftan

"Unscheduled Maintenance" Leads to Avatar Glitches Inworld

If you had trouble with your avatar loading properly yesterday, or not loading at all, you weren't alone. In Discord and Facebook, residents were saying their avatars wouldn't fully rezz. As it turned out, Second Life was having "Unscheduled Maintenance" at the time.

At this time we are undergoing unscheduled maintenance that may cause some avatars to appear as a cloud for an extended period of time. We expect this issue to clear up gradually over the next hour or two, and inventory is not affected by this maintenance. Please note that at this time relogging will not resolve an avatar appearing as a cloud and mass relogging may extend the timeline for resolution. We thank you for your patience, and apologize for the inconvenience. Please follow this blog for more updates. 

At 12:14PM SL time, Linden Lab declared the problem resolved.

It was two weeks ago that the Grid had a number of times in which avatars would crash and be unable to login for a while. Sunday the 28th was the worst day, blamed on DDoS attacks, but not the only day.

Image Credit: Brandi Streusel

Bixyl Shuftan

Reader Submitted: Codename: L.E.A.P.F.R.O.G.

While it originally started out as a hangout for occasional parties, Erik Mouse has recently made an effort for "Surf's Up" at Sunny Beach to have events once a week every Saturday afternoon. But the best laid plans of mice and men can go awry, and one party not long ago ended rather abruptly. Although things were soon cleared up, Erik felt that it was still necessary for him to explain what happened. So he recently sent in a reader submission about what happened from his point of view and his plans on what to do in the future.

Read Erik's submission in Extra.

Technical Difficulties

Computers can be buggy little things, and sometimes an attempt to fix things can backfire. A website a friend recommended to see that might be slowing down my computer instead of giving me a certain freeware program instead led to something else. What did was try to get rid of files it considered "junk," and this unfortunately included access to most of my screenshots on this computer.

What this means is work on several articles and possible articles will be delayed until I can get new screenshots of the areas in questions, at least unless I can regain access to the pictures. It's also likely there may not be more cartoons for a week or two. It depends whether or not I come across scenes with potential humor. While a darn nuisance, it's not truly devastating.

On a related matter, the Singularity viewer I've been using lately has been having some problems. At first, I would see an occasional mesh object that was invisible or stretched. While still uncommon, it's been happening more and more often. Using Firestorm seems to solve this problem. Trouble is, Firestorm is much more likely to crash on my computer, which means doing interviews on it is taking a chance.

Hopefully there will soon be an update for Singularity that will take care of this mess.

Bumps in the road in my journey in Second Life. Hopefully I won't run into one that does the equivalent of breaking an axle.

Bixyl Shuftan

Longtime Bitcoin Developer Quits, States It Has "Failed"

By Bixyl Shuftan

Bitcoin, the noted electronic currency that's gained a following among computer geeks attracted to the idea of a worldwide virtual currency and those looking for an alternative to the US dollar and other currencies backed by big banks, has made news time to time, such as when it went through wild price swings in March and April 2013, and when one of it's largest exchanges, Mt Gox, went bankrupt in Feb 2014. Since then, the Crypto currency has continued on, making news recently as the best performing currency in 2015, gaining close to 40 percent.

But a couple weeks ago, it was dealt a major setback when one of it's developers and longtime advocate, Mike Hearn, sold all his bitcoin and published a blog, saying Bitcoin had failed, and would no longer be taking part in it. He wrote, "It has failed because the community has failed. What was meant to be a new, decentralized form of money that lacked “systemically important institutions” and “too big to fail” has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse. The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have broken down ..."

So what are the problems? The big one, Hearn stated, is that the rate at which Bitcoin transactions can be made has been decreasing to the point it's networks are running out of capacity and becoming unreliable. Backlogs at peak times are becoming increasingly common. The blocks in it's blockchain have been steadily increasing, but the capacity cap of each block remains unchanged. While there are several reasons that the capacity limit hasn't been raised, the big one is that it's been effectively controlled by Chinese miners, "just two of whom control more than 50% of the hash power. At a recent conference over 95% of hashing power was controlled by a handful of guys sitting on a single stage."

So why won't they allow the capacity to grow? Hearn wrote, " the Chinese internet is so broken by their government’s firewall that moving data across the border barely works at all, with speeds routinely worse than what mobile phones provide. Imagine an entire country connected to the rest of the world by cheap hotel wifi, and you’ve got the picture. Right now, the Chinese miners are able to — just about — maintain their connection to the global internet and claim the 25 BTC reward ($11,000) that each block they create gives them. But if the Bitcoin network got more popular, they fear taking part would get too difficult and they’d lose their income stream. This gives them a perverse financial incentive to actually try and stop Bitcoin becoming popular."

As Hamlet Au would comment in New World Notes, "Ironically enough ... a currency that is so appealing to libertarians" was being strangled "because of well, the Chinese Communist Party. ... A virtual currency which promised to free us from government oversight and oppression is being successfully strangled in its crib by one of the world's most oppressive regimes. Without hardly even trying."

Despite this blow, Bitcoin remains popular. And it's unlikely it will collapse anytime soon. But as Chris Baraniuk writing for the BBC put it, "it certainly look(s) as though fundamental questions over how Bitcoin works are now coming to a head."

Sources: Mike Hearn, BBC, New World Notes.

Bixyl Shuftan

Discussion About The Bright Canopy Viewer

On September 5, the Bright Canopy service, which offers a viewer designed to allow tablet users to go inworld and about in Second Life, held a conference inworld at their sim. They discussed some of the recent developments concerning their viewer, followed by a Q&A session.

Read about the conference in Design.

Unscheduled Maintenance

Yesterday in the afternoon, things weren't going quite right for some Second Life residents. Some couldn't log in. Others couldn't teleport or ended up in places like the hub in the Adult sim of Arapama. Ending up there, the only way I could escape was to log off and relog at my Home location. So what was going on? A look at the Grid Status revealed a problem.

Unscheduled Maintenance
Posted by Status Desk on October 27th, 2014 at 03:24 pm PDT
[Posted 3:24 PM PDT, 27 October 2014] We are currently undergoing unscheduled maintenance to several systems. Some Residents may experience difficulties with multiple services, including logins, Web dashboards, and searches. Please keep an eye on this blog for details.

Eventually people were able to log in and port as they were before, though for a while, things were frustrating.

An Unexpected Problem With Oculus Rift

By Bixyl Shuftan

Danah Boyd of Quartz wrote an interesting article that suggest a little caution about the notion that the Oculus Rift could be a cure-all for Second Life's ills. Despite all the "guy in real life" jokes, it's agreed that close to half of Second Life's users are female. So when Dana's article suggested that women were more likely than men to feel nausea from using a 3D rig, it's likely to get attention. "By and large, my male friends and colleagues had no problem with these systems," Dana wrote, "My female peers, in the other hand, turned green."

Why were girls more likely to have trouble. As it turns out, there's evidence sex hormones affect the retina more than any other body part apart from genitals. The reason this is a problem is there are two ways someone can tell depth perception, "motion parallax," which has to do with an object's apparent size, and "shape from shading," which is how the light from off an object changes when you look at if from a slightly different perspective. While virtual reality handles the former just fine, "3D graphics does a terrible job of truly emulating shape from shifting." And Dana's research concluded women on the whole rely on shape-from-shading much more than men (pdf link).

This doesn't mean that this applies to each and every one. Some women can still handle Oculus with ease while some guys will need a barf bag handy. Still, it's a suggestion that perhaps more research needs to be done on the matter.

Source: Quartz Magazine 
Image Source: Jeff Chiu

Bixyl Shuftan

Marketplace Problems

The Marketplace isn't always what it's cracked up to be. But sometimes one has to worry more about glitches. Theonlyjohnny has a few things to say about the trouble he had with shopping via the Marketplace from his search jammed full of demo items to being outright scammed.

Read Theonlyjohnny's article in Extra.

QuickTips - "Getting Help"

The next in Linden Lab's "QuickTips" videos, how to get help for bugs and similar issues.

Second Life is fun — but sometimes you might encounter a problem inworld.

Need help with your land? Have a billing question? We want to help you make the most of your Second Life. This week’s QuickTips video tutorial walks you through the many support options available to both basic and premium Second Life users.

Learn more about our Knowledge Base and Support Portal, as well as Abuse Report options and more.

Peeking Outside Second Life

Well, yours truly gave another virtual world a try.

I like to explore around, and while there is no shortage of places to look around in SL, this is entirely new territory. With the troubles in Second Life, some residents are looking for alternatives just in case land becomes to expensive to own, or worse.

One alternative some friends told me about is Inworldz. Described in its FAQ as "a Virtual World initially based off the OpenSim software," they gave it a try, and liked it. While sticking around in Second Life, they return occasionally to keep an eye on goings on.

So yours truly decided to give it a try. I downloaded the client software and ... it didn't work. But the Imprudence Viewer could also access Inworldz. So I tried that and ... made it. But I was cloudy, things took longer to rez than in Second Life, and in less than a minute I crashed. I tried again, and crashed again seconds later. Third time was not the charm, crashing again in about a minute.

A friend told me that the newest version of Imprudence was more stable, so I downloaded that and gave it a try. This time, I lasted long enough for me to check my inventory and find a cloud-dispeller. I managed to walk a short distance, then lag hit, stopping me in my tracks. I was able to pan around, but after a few minutes I crashed.

It looks like Inworldz isn't an option for me, at least for now. Other virtual worlds? Blue Mars has gotten some talk, but as it's not Mac compatible, it's not an option for me. Getting a PC? As a blue-collar worker, buying one just for access to a second metaverse is not exactly a smart use of money.

So for now, it looks like my only alternatives to Linden Labs are World of Warcraft and Facebook.

For now.

Bixyl Shuftan

Update on Tuna Oddfellow of the Odd Ball

Tuna Oddfellow and his partner Shava Suntzu, the owners of the unique “Odd Ball” show, have had some troubled times this year, with Tuna falling ill. Second Life Newser recently met up with them, to see how their situation has changed.

Read the story in People.