Some Technical Difficulties

 

Been crashing a little more lately, and coming back, it sometimes looks like this. So bear with me for the next few days. It'll resolve itself, I hope. 

July 19 Tech Outage Could Cost Over Five Billion Dollars

 

Last Friday, a massive global tech outage affected many thousands from airport travelers to 911 callers to hospital workers as data and communication became unavailable.  Airlines were particularly hard hit, some still having many more delayed flights for days. CNN reported one insurance company stated the crash, "will cost Fortune 500 companies alone more than $5 billion in direct losses."

 

Crowdsrtike would also issue a report about what went wrong, saying that it came from part of it's security system that checks for hacking on customer's computers and smartphones after an update was made which was glitched. While it's updates are screened before being released, there was a bug in the system that allowed it to get through, “despite containing problematic content data.”The result was the "blue screen of death" on millions of computers and smartphones, which could only be delt with by manual operations, sometimes over and over and over.

For more information, check CNN. 

Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of The Day: Crashed Witch

 

 

 A decoration of a witch having crashed into a tree. Just what would distract someone on a flying broomstick to this point?

By Bixyl Shuftan

 

Cartoon of the Day

 

Taken at the Happy Vixen. For those who don't know, Black Dragon's a third-party viewer, known for crisp graphics. 

By Bixyl Shuftan

 

SL Poetry: "Oh TP Crash"

Oh tp crash,
Oh tp crash,
How I love the tp crash,

Oh tp crash,
Oh tp crash,
How I love the tp crash,

Just when I want to simply go home,
You lock me up and throw me to the gnomes,

Oh tp crash,
Oh tp crash,
How I love the tp crash,

Here is my hope for Linden wootmas gifts,
They only get smelly coal and malware bits.

Oh tp crash,
Oh tp crash,
How I love the tp crash,

The End , Thank you and Merry Wootmas 

by Caleb Kit, on the Raglan Shire Discord channel

Cartoon of the Day

By Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day: Crashy Firefox

Taken at the Happy Vixen Haunted Carnival. The Spirit Fennec avatars have a number of animations, including one that makes it jumped into a hole. Or maybe, it crashed.

By Bixyl Shuftan

Update on the "Teleport Disconnects"

Earlier this month, Linden Lab came out and admitted what the residents had more or less figured out, Second Life was much buggier than usual, especially when it came to teleporting from sim to sim or crossing sim borders. So has there been improvement since then? Maybe some. Checking "Modem World," Inara Pey stated "There have been mixed reports on the outcome of the deployment made on Thursday, April 18th, 2019, with some indicating matters have improved, others reporting no real change. In particular, people visiting Fantasy Faire and travelling around the new Linden Homes continent appear to be faring a lot better than had been the case."

Simon Linden was quoted as saying at the Simulator User Group, " for server news, many of us are focused on the teleport issues … I hate to promise anything, but we all know a lot more about TP internal problems than we used to (smile) . We do understand they’re annoying and a frustrating problem – we definitely want to fix it and make it better."

Earlier, some residents wondered if the Lab moving data to Cloud servers was the cause of the glitches. Lately, there's been a new suspect, the EEP or Environmental Enhancement Project. Simon did admit that the problems appearing just after the release of EEP was "suspicious" and they were "trying to sort out is if somehow the environmental work caused the TP problems." He didn't think the glitches were related to avatar complecity, though stated "that said, the more complex your AV is, the more work it needs to change regions. It’s always been better to have fewer scripts and data for teleports and region crossings."

On a personal note, I myself seem to be having fewer problems with teleport disconnects, though there are still other glitches such as the viewer freezing for a bit. Some friends of mine are still crashing when teleporting around, so it seems the problem is still around.

Source: Modem World, SL Wiki

Bixyl Shuftan

"Darn Teleport Disconnects," Lab Admits Grid Trouble

If you're been having trouble teleporting across Second Life lately, you're not alone. Lately, a number of people in group chats I've listened in on, as well as friends and associates in private messages, have been complaining about various glitches on the grid. Besides the lag, probably the most frequent complaint I've heard has been crashing while trying to teleport from one spot to another.

Well, it seems things have gotten to the point that the Lab has to acknowledge there's a problem. In the "Tools and Technology" part of the official Second Life blog on Monday April 9, they posted that they're aware of the problem.

Many Residents have noted that in the last few weeks we have had an increase in disconnects during a teleport. These occur when an avatar attempts to teleport to a new Region (or cross a Region boundary, which is handled similarly internally) and the teleport or Region crossing takes longer than usual.  Instead of arriving at the expected destination, the viewer disconnects ...

The Lab believes that the cause is "a timing-sensitive failure in the hand-off" between sims when a teleport takes place, and there doesn't seem to be a way to eliminate the chance of a crash. They have people trying to get to the root of the problem and get rid of it. "Quite unfortunately, this problem dodged our usual monitors of the behavior of simulators in the Release Channels, and as a result we're also enhancing those monitors to prevent similar problems getting past us in the future. We're sorry about this - we empathize with how disruptive it has been."

A few residents I've talked to wonder if Linden Lab's moving information of it's data centers to cloud servers has something to do with recent bugs. When Patch and Grumpity Linden spoke at the VWBPE last Thursday, Grumpity stated the Lab was "very carefully moving things and not disturbing the way things are set up." So if one takes the Lab's word for it, the problem isn't The Cloud.

In the meantime, it looks like residents will be dealing with the possibility of their teleports ending up as viewer crashes, and having to restart the viewers and slowly log back in.

Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day

Taken at the Happy Vixen. While some planes such as ultralights work just fine with the same gas that goes in a car, others require fuel with higher octane and special additives.

By Bixyl Shuftan

A Crashy Relay

There's been more than a few comments about the lag at the Relay Weekend. Among them, "Is it just me, or is this the laggiest Relay ever?" And there are the jokes "It ain't Relay until you crash a couple dozen times," "Every time you crash, make a donation at a kiosk."

For me personally, I can't recall a time when it was this bad. I was crashing about every second sim crossing most of the time. It was much the same for others, who were continuing to find the sim ahead of them gone (like in the picture above). One friend told me among the luminaria on the side of the roads, one had been named, "In honor of the sim ahead."

Fortunately, there were options, such as dialing back on one's viewer. Though if one wants to take pictures, such as myself, one can do that only so much. And there are the music events one could stay at and not cross sims, which on my map were well-attended. And of course there was sticking to their team campsite. But if one wanted to go about the sims and take pictures, not much else one could do but restart the viewer a lot. As one friend put it, the Relay Weekend simply stretches the Second Life hardware to it's limits and only so much can be done about it.

Hopefully the lag will be better today.

Bixyl Shuftan

Reader Submitted: Trailer Trashed

While at one of Montecito Bay's parties, Lem Aiko (LemonPledge Resident) handed this picture to me, "Bajo wrecked my car into the roof of my trailer and it caught fire!"

DrRedRedWine Resident, who was nearby and knew what was going on, remarked, "He's remodeling Lem's trailer!"

Hopefully Montecito Bay's insurance company pulled through on the replacement.

Virtual Art Project Causes Crash by Inventory Overload

Some of us use quite a few attachments for fancy outfits. And at parties we'll engage in the consumption of scripted food to make it look more like a real life event. But how many of us thought about doing what Mijn Seoung (Martina Menegon), a performance artist in real life and Second Life, recently attempted. She tried attaching everything she had in her inventory to her avatar.



As one can see in this video, early on in the process her avatar was looking less than comfortable. As things went on, she ended up with thousands of objects and eventually "overloading the system" that finally caused her to crash. Unfortunately, she finds that her stunt has rendered her unable to get on.

I was a Second Life resident for almost 10 years, and the only reason I am using the past tense is because I somehow destroyed my poor virtual me for an art project: I wanted to record the result of me attaching everything I owned in Second Life to my avatar (thousands of different hair styles and colors, clothes, shoes, animations, furniture, houses, etc.). I somehow overloaded the system and my avatar started changing, then transformed into a white cloud, and then the software crashed. Since then, whenever I try to open Second Life, the app crashes. I tried some solutions I found online but nothing worked. I will try to contact the Linden Lab soon, because I have to admit, I miss being in Second Life.

For the full story, read Hamlet Au's article on this noteworthy test of Second Life's tolerances as part of artistic expression. To my knowledge, sorry to say Mijin is still unable to log on and could use some advice on what to do. No doubt she's tried calling the Lab for help, though as Hamlet put it, "Not sure if Linden Lab tech support has a 'Performance art' category in its tracking system."

Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day

For those who don't know the punchline, Click Here.

By Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day

By Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoons of the Day: Relay Weekend

 Regulars at Second Life's Relay Walk often joke that the lag gets worse every year. Though this time, Linden Lab had it's big "Project Sunshine" update just days before. So some people wondered this time if it really was our imagination.

By Bixyl Shuftan

Virtual Cash Makes Real-Life News with Bitcoin Crash

By Bixyl Shuftan


Last month, the US Department of the Treasury issued "guidelines" aimed at virtual currencies. While the Linden dollar will be affected by the Government's interest, another virtual currency with a larger distribution and volume was also targeted: the bitcoin.

Wikipedia defines the Bitcoin, abbreviated to BTC sometimes, as "an online commodity that is based on an open-source, peer-to-peer encryption protocol … creation and transfer is accomplished on an Internet-based network and is not managed by any central authority." Bitcoins are created through "miners" that automatically add new amounts by "adding codes to a decentralized log, which is updated and archived periodically." They're transferred electronically, either via computer, or through handheld devices like smartphones.

Computer geeks are sometimes drawn to it due to it's online nature. But as banks are not necessary in the exchange, and it is not created by governments, some people are attracted to it due to the lack of involvement by larger institutions. It's also gotten some skeptics because of the lack of involvement by larger institutions, and concerns that drug traffickers and other criminals use it as an easy way to sell illegal goods.

Bitcoin went through what some are calling a "bubble" recently when it's value jumped from about $90 in late March to a high of $260 on the morning of Wednesday April 10th. Then the value crashed, plummeting to around $130 in six hours. It regained some of it's lost value the following day, rising to $160. As of the writing of this article, bitcoincharts.com listed the value as $99.00.


The crash was linked to an unknown bitcoin owner who up and gave away $13,000 in bitcoins via the Reddit social website. But there have been other problems. There have been attempts by hackers to break into computers and make it mine bitcoins for the hijacker. News of this did cause a drop in the value of Bitcoins on April 4, but the price surge continued again. There was also an account hacking in which $12,800 worth of Bitcoin was stolen.


The crash has caused some to feel Bitcoins, or any other unregulated currency, is just too risky. But others are still trading them. Even as all this was going on, people in the US Treasury Department had already taken notice. In March, the Department of Treasury's FinCEN issued it's guidelines, defining Bitcoin as a "de-centralized virtual currency" with "no central repository and no single administrator, and … persons may obtain by their own computing or manufacturing effort." Like Linden Labs, Bitcoin miners in the United States will have to file anti-money laundering reports with the Treasury Department, in addition to registering with them. There is a "blurred definition" however between users of Bitcoin and "administrators." Could a miner be considered just a user as long as the Bitcoins created weren't traded for US dollars or other real-life money?

Already having caught the interest of the US Government, with the news of hacking attacks and the market volatility, bitcoin is highly likely to face additional scrutiny from both American and European authorities. It's laissez-faire days of being free from big business and government may soon be coming to a close.

For information on what a bitcion cost, check this April 14th article at techcrunch.com.

Second image from salon.com

Sources: Wikipeda, BBC News, CNN, verge.com, Modern Payment Systems

Bixyl Shuftan

News and Commentary: "Graphics Card" Griefing Attacks on Club Show a Serious Problem

Griefers in Second Life are nothing new. Ranging from simple pranksters to good for nothings whose single purpose on the Grid seems to be to make others miserable, for most residents they've been little more than a pesky nusciance. But a recent series of attacks at the Junkyard Blues Club have demonstrated a double problem: a new griefer weapon that's gotten people worried about the safety of their computers, and Linden Lab seemingly not doing a single thing about those using it, or even its appearance on Marketplace.

Read the commentary in Extra.

Happy Halloween

From Bixyl and Jasmine Dawn Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day: Warbug Wackiness

At the Warbug Air Show last weekend, their creator Arduenn Schwartzman had a little trouble, and crashed into the stands. This probably wasn't his exact quote, but he was saying something alone this line. I didn't say anything, but the cartoon shows what I was thinking. ;-)

Bixyl Shuftan