Relay Sims Taken Down, Quicker Than Normal

 

 Normally Relayer camp builders have some time after the Flood Party to take down their builds, and people have a little time to see the camps. But not this year. Less than a day after the Flood Party, most were down. Aside from the three permanent American Cancer Society sims and RFL Screening & RFL Royal Ascot, which are up for the Royal Ascot event, they are offline and unreachable. 

 "Linden Labs were quick to the draw this year," Selene (selene Jashan) remarked, "I think the lindens were bored (laughter)." For those who wanted a copy of their campsite marker, "If you did not get your campsite marker please reach out to Sass Piggins  She can help you as well as Kitty (Prettykitty Gumbo) to make sure you get your badges to put on it."

 

For those wanting to get a look at the campsites, Wildstar Beaumont took some pictures he would post on his Flickr (here).  

 

But while most of the Relay Track sims are gone does not mean no more activity. As mentioned earlier, the Royal Ascot is going on in two sims.  Also in ACS 3, The Relay Rainbow events are taking place at (153/170/21). Both are going on until Sunday June 21st. But for most of the teams, their events are over, congratulating one another for a job well done.

 

More on the Relay later,

 

*Addition*  There have been a few comments in Relay Discord, Avariel Falcon saying, "They have been more snappy with region closures recently, the same thing happened with SciFi. Although in that case they re-opened them for a while so we could collect our stuff." Cynthia Farshore would comment this sudden development would mean no video of hers of the sims this year, "Well I thought I had the time after the sinking to fly my Wild for a Cure balloon around for the annual youtube video, nope. POOF! Oh well. Normally LL drags it's heels to do anything this time it went for the cheetah award." Fuzzball Ortega wondered, "Someone was on their toes at the Lab. They must be new."

 

Bixyl Shuftan 

 

Tiny Empires Down?

 

Things have been a little frustrating for the fans of Tiny Empires in the Sunweavers, the community in which the Newser has it's office. For those who don't know, "Tiny Empires" is a HUD=based game in which players slowly gain land, gold, and rank over time. Although the game has been around for many years, it still has a following. 

 

Unfortunately, something is wrong with the game. Sunweaver leader Rita Mariner informed the Newser the HUDs haven't been working for a few days.Taking a look myself, they were stuck in "connecting," with no information about acres or gold or liege sworn to.

 

This sounds similar to another failure in 2012, which was eventually resolved. 

 

As of the writing of this article, Tiny Empire creator, and Emperor, Ultralite Soliel, has not been online for several days and is unavailable for comment.  

 

The Tiny Empires game, and Tiny Empires 3000, are available at: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Kitster/147/41/54

 

*Addition* On Monday afternoon, the servers finally came online and the game was on.  

 

Bixyl Shuftan 

 

"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 

 

Gemma Cleanslate Temporary Out With Hand Injury

 

If you're wondering where intrepid reporter Gemma Cleanslate has been, this weekend she contacted the Newser saying she'd hurt her hand, and it'll be a short while at least until she's writing again.

 

Looking forward to your return, Gemma. 

 

Some Technical Difficulties

 

My connection to the Internet went down during the night, and only now has just been restored.

 

 Some articles may be delayed a little, but they will be done.

Bixyl Shuftan 

 

Gemma's Internet Connection Down

 

For those wondering why SL Newser reporter Gemma Cleanslate hasn't had anything in the paper for a little while, her Internet connection is down, having to rely on a friend to send email. It should be taken care of soon, and her articles resuming.

Virtualverse Forums Down

 

 

 Virtualverse, probably the most popular online forums to discuss Second Life other than the official ones run by Linden Lab, is offline. According to Daniel Voyager, it has been down since early February. 

Virtualverse was preceded by the SL Universe forums, which were popular with both factual discussion and "peanut gallery" irreverent chatter. Then in September 2018, a couple months shy of it's 15th anniversary, it's owner Cristiano Midnight began taking it down and created a new forum area: Virtualverse. While perhaps not as active as it's predecessor, it still got plenty of attention, including from Tyche Shepard who would post statistics about Second Life there.

 

Daniel Voyager would state that Cristiano had some health problems that he was recovering from in early January.  It is unknown if these troubles have anything to do with the forums being down or when they will be back up. For now, fans can continue to use the Virtualverse Discord channel (here). 

Source: Daniel Voyager

Bixyl Shuftan

"Dreamer's Virtual World" Blog Taken Down

 

For those readers who check up occasionally on "Dreamer's Virtual Blog," written and owned by Dreamer Pixelmaid, they've noticed a problem. That blog is not currently up.

 

Dreamer didn't take it down. Nor has she left Second Life. She's still around and I had a few words with her the other day in Bellisseria chat. The problem it seems is with Google, who owns blogspot. They took it down.

 

 When I asked her when this happened, Dreamer answered, "February 15th. It's all in that post. I had my blog for 13+ years. I've always had my blogs with Blogger, since they started, and never had any problems. ... I got an email saying that my blog had been removed and blocked because it had been reported for SPAM, and if I didn't agree, I could click a link to ask for a review. I did that on the same day they sent me the email, (on) Feb. 15th. Still waiting." 

Dreamer would also explain the problem on her "notice board." 

 

On February 15th, Dreamer's Virtual World was locked by Blogger. My blog was reported for SPAM. No idea why as I didn't have any ads or anything "spammy" in my blog, but Blogger / Google removes first and checks later. The problem is everything is automated so you cannot talk to a human being. Also, I have a free account so they are in no hurry. There's nothing else I can do but wait.  

 

I don't have access to my blog so I cannot move it to another platform. I don't get money from blogging. I created and maintain my blog to share information and help as many people as I can. I spent so much time and energy, I'm not going to lie, the whole thing has been very upsetting and I'm heartbroken. 

For now, anyone wishing to access her blog can do so through the "Wayback Machine." She also has a Discord server, "Dreamer's SL," and an inworld group, Dreamer's Second Life (Tips&Gifts). As to when her blog will resume, for now all we can do is say it might be tomorrow, next week, next month, or possibly longer.

Stay tuned for further details

Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day

 

Taken at the Christmas Expo
 
By Bixyl Shuftan

 

A Bad Week For Facebook and Twitch, Windows 11 Launched

It was not the best week for Facebook last week.  On Tuesday October 5, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook manager turned whistleblower, testified before Congress. She stated the company knew it's app Instagram could be hazardous to the mental health of teenage girls, and knew it was not doing enough to combat disinformation on it's social media website that contributed to the worsening political divide in the United States and led to the January 6 riot. While it could have taken measures to protect girls on Instagram and done more about misinformation on Facebook, it had not done so as the company didn't want to cut into it's profits, putting money over the safety of it's customers. Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg would respond with a statement denying her accusations.

But then came more bad news in the form of a six hour outage of both Facebook and Instagram. While for most it was an annoyance, some small businesses have come to rely on Facebook for communication with their customers. Also affected were sets of Oculus VR headgear. The company would eventually offer an apology.  It's estimated that the company lost billions from this outage. Then on Friday, the company suffered another outage and once again Facebook and Instagram were down once more, another blow to it's reputation.

Facebook wasn't the only social media platform to face big trouble. On Wed Oct 6, there was a massive data leak targeting Twitch. Over 100 gigabytes of data was posted online on Wednesday October 6. This includes operational details that the company "fiercely guards," such as how many millions the top streamers made in revenue from broadcasting. "Aside from the salary details, the documents seems to contain the site's source code and even technical details for yet to be released products and platforms," Joe Tidy in an article on BBC News would say, adding if everything was confirmed it would be, "the biggest leak I have ever seen - an entire company's most valuable data cleaned out in one fell swoop." ThreatModeler founder and CEO Archie Agarwal would say of the data breach,"This is as bad as it could possibly be."

While there didn't seem to be any passwords included in the leaked data, it was listed as "part one," hinting there was more to come. Still, it is reccomended that Twitch users change their passwords anyway.

Tuesday October 5 was the release date of Windows 11. Six years ago, Microsoft was saying there would be only new installments of Windows 10. That has changed, and the company has launched a new version that promises to be "clean and fresh and simpler." If you're reluctant to change over to the new system, you'll have plenty of company. The list of machines the company says this version of Windows needs has been described as "ridiculously strict." In a review on PC Gamer, the writers thought Windows 11 had a few nice improvements, but nothing worth upgrading to the new system, and a number of reasons to wait. Officially, PC users have until October 2025 to wait. After that, Microsoft plans no more technical or security updates.

Sources: BBC News, PC Gamer, The Verge   

Bixyl Shuftan
  

"Unscheduled Maintenance" Offlines Second Life For Hours

 

If you tried to log into Second Life yesterday and couldn't get on, you were far from alone. For much of the day, residents couldn't log in, or access secondlife.com, or the Marketplace. The Grid Status Report first mentioned there was a problem at 11:14 AM SL time. 

We are currently seeing intermittent issues with Profiles, Marketplace, and Log ins, and we are currently investigating this. Please watch this blog for updates.

Posted * ***** ***. Aug 31, 2021 - 11:14 PDT

Unfortunately, the issue was not resolved quickly. Hours would pass, and the Lab's finest were still working on the issue.

We are still working on resolving this, and we thank you for your patience! Please watch this blog for updates. 

Finally at 3:57 PM SL time, the Lab stated they were on their way to fixing the problem.

All services should be recovered, and we continue to monitor their performance. If you're having trouble getting to some of the websites, please try clearing your cookies. Thank you for your patience, and we hope the rest of today is going to be all smooth sailing. 

Still, it wouldn't be 5:54 PM SL time before the Lab would say with confidence, "This incident has been resolved," over six hours since they announced their was a problem. When residents tried to get on the website, sometimes all they got was a blank page. At other times they would get the "Uh oh, it's buggy" 500 error message shown at the top. A few residents would look back to earlier times when Linden Lab was more willing to poke fun at itself and post a picture of apes armed with bones gathering around a monolith, "The grid is down while we bang on things." A few more irritated residents wondered if the glitch was a result of the Cloud Servers, and something they could expect time to time for the forseable future. 

In any event, the glitch has been fixed, and all is well again, for now.

Bixyl Shuftan
 

Late Night Grid Issues

 If you were trying to log in late last night and couldn't, it wasn't just you. The Grid became not accessible to those whom weren't already on, eventually showing up in the Grid Status Report.


Second Life is currently unavailable. Our engineers are working on correcting the issue as quickly as we can. Please check this blog for future updates as we have them.


According to the Grid Status Report, the issue was found at 2:30 SL time, and fixed almost an hour later.

Relay Weekend Track Closed, Wildstar's 1000-Plus Page Relay Album

I hadn't heard any official word of the Relay Track being closed to traffic (with the SLB so much in the news, maybe it got lost in the chatter). So checking the map, I noticed while the sims were still on the map, the names were gone from all but the permanent American Cancer Society sim. Heading over, the track was indeed invisible from ACS, which is an island once more as the track really is closed.

So this year, no picture of watching the sun set on the Relay track sims.

On the other hand, Wildstar Beaumont has been busy with his Flickr. He recently announced his album of screenshots of the Relay Weekend was ready for all to see. And with over a thousand pictures, there is a lot to see.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wildstar_b/albums/72157714599747767

Bixyl Shuftan

More on The Scheduled Maintenance Outage

On late Monday night just after 9:30PM SL time, Second Life experienced an outage that offlined practically all the residents. While some trouble was expected due to the scheduled maintenance that night, what happened was a surprise. Not just logins onto the Grid, but Marketplace, secondlife.com, JIRA, mysecondlife. and more were disabled.

In the forums, Grumpity Linden would respond the the comments of residents in the "Network Maintenance" and the "Second Life is Down" threads, "It's probably cold comfort to reiterate to everyone here that this is not our idea of a good time either." "We're not actually that crazy about taking down the grid, but we had to bang on some things, and are terribly sorry! "

Reactions from the residents varied. One person messaged me, asking me if I thought Linden Lab hand finally shut down Second Life for good. Others grumbled. Some began cracking jokes about not knowing what to do with their time now that they couldn't log in (not unlike the Facebook outage a couple months ago), that there'd be a small baby boom in nine months, and that finally Sansar had more people inworld than Second Life had. And of course there were jokes about the Lindens "banging on things," someone tripping over a power cord, and the cleaning lady causing a short after plugging in her vacuum in the wrong place, Grumpity commenting, "I feel like the cleaning crew is getting a bad rep here!"

Finally at 1:43AM Tuesday morning, the Lindens announced on the Grid Status Report, "We are bringing services back online. Logins have been turned back on. Your experience may still be bumpy as normal concurrency resumes. Thank you for your patience!" Grumpity would say, "Thank you all for your patience.  We can't wait to call it a night! "

But on Tuesday night as this was a second night of scheduled maintenance, there were some worries this would happen again. Grumpity assured that this was highly unlikely, "While you may experience minor disruption, it will be nothing like last night.   Just in case though, we've sacrificed a goat.  It gives us just a little extra confidence." Fortunately, there was no major disruption that night, and residents appear to have more or less gotten about normally.

Third image credit, JB Raccoon

Bixyl Shuftan

Breaking News: Second Life is Down

 If you got knocked off online, you're far from alone. Shortly after 9:30PM SL time, most residents were logged off the grid. A look at the Firestorn viewer showed only a few hundred still on the Grid. A look at the Grid Status Report showed logins were disabled.

While this was the first of four days of scheduled maintenance, it's doubtful they intended to log off everyone. For now, they've disabled logins. Grumpity Linden says people should be able to get back on "soon."

Stay tuned for more information.

FaceBook Hit With 14 Hour Outage

If you tried to get on Facebook yesterday but couldn't, you were far from alone. On Wednesday March 13, the social network was hit with an outage that made it not accessible to most of it's users. The disruption lasted for about fourteen hours, it's worst in over a decade.

Facebook announced the outage through another social network: Twitter, "We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible." The cause of the trouble has not been officially announced, though Facebook denied it was a Distributed Denial of Service attack. One NBC reporter stated the problem came from "overloaded" databases.

The problem was worldwide, and numbers in Europe and Asia are reportedly still having trouble.  Instagram and WhatsApp, which are owned by Facebook, were also down.

Reactions from people varied from people complaining they couldn't message to friends, to people poking fun at themselves that they had no idea what to do, to some wondering if this was a reminder about how many have become dependent on social networks. The last time Facebook was down for this long was in 2008 when it had 150 million users. Today, over two billion use it.

Sources: BBC, NBC, Twitter

Bixyl Shuftan

Back After Technical Difficulties

I once stated the Newser updates 364 days a year. Why not 365 days? Because of the possibility of storms knocking down power lines, or just plain old-fashion computer breakdown. Over the weekend, that's what happened, and my computer just got back.

I'll be back on my feet soon. In the meantime, checking up with friends and events inworld.

Second Life Hit By Large Scale DDOS Attack

Second Life has been under attack by trolls many times. But this time, hackers are the ones causing the trouble.

For the second day in a row, residents have had trouble getting inworld. People couldn't log in, or if they were already in, they'd be logged out. People had trouble bringing up the Second Life webpage as well as Marketplace. Yours truly couldn't get on until after 7PM SL time. Curiously, Firestorm was also described as being down. There was naturally speculation about the cause. One person wondered if one of the twelve employees Linden Lab recently let go had something to do with it. Others suspected a DDOS, or Distributed Denial of Service, attack.

Finally just after 11AM SL time, April Linden finally announced the cause, an unusually large DDOS, one that the Lab stated were "at a level that we rarely see."

As I’m sure most of y’all have noticed, Second Life has had a rough 24 hours. We’re experiencing outages unlike any in recent history, and I wanted to take a moment and explain what’s going on.
The grid is currently undergoing a large DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. Second Life being hit with a DDoS attack is pretty routine. It happens quite a bit, and we’re good at handling it without a large number of Residents noticing. However, the current DDoS attacks are at a level that we rarely see, and are impacting the entire grid at once. 

My team (the Second Life Operations Team) is working as hard as we can to mitigate these attacks. We’ve had people working round-the-clock since they started, and will continue to do so until they settle down. (I had a very late night, myself!) 

Second Life is not the only Internet service that’s been targeted today. My sister and brother opsen at other companies across the country are fighting the same battle we are. It’s been a rough few days on much of the Internet. 

We’re really sorry that access to Second Life has been so sporadic over the last day. Trying to combat these attacks has the full attention of my team, and we’re working as hard as we can on it. We’ll keep posting on the Second Life Status Blog as we have new updates.

As I am writing this, I've been hearing that various online retailers have also been hit with DDOS attacks. Although the Grid Status Report suggests there are still problems, some are telling me they can get on again. Hopefully the issue will be resolved quickly.

Image Credit: Spooked Dreamscape

Bixyl Shuftan

The Relay Track Comes Down

"All good things must come to an end." And so must every Relay Weekend track. Even before "Teardown Day" on Thursday July 20, a few campsites were taken down the day before on Wednesday. This included the Sunbeamer camp, for some reason. Fortunately, a number of others remained up until the late afternoon and evening. And so people made last minute trips seeing them in detail, finishing up various hunts and games, or just going down the track one last time. Yours truly has also been busy taking pictures of the exhibits. Sadly I didn't get a detailed look of them all, but I get get a look at a number.

Taken by Trader Whiplash

"(sigh) T1Tower comes crashing down," Trader Whiplash announced, sending a picture of the radio exhibit's build not simply vanishing, but coming down with a symbolic crash, "hates this part of relay."

From Relay chat, taker unknown

"Best. RFL. Weekend. EVER!" commented Avariel Falcon in Relay chat, "Except for next year, that will be even better!" RaydenRider Resident spoke, "It was an amazing weekend though thanks to every single Relayer in SL." One told the group, "t was a terrible rollercoaster... lost a family member and a dear friend of mine just days before the weekend."

Ertina Loopen commented, "It is hard to see it go, but envision it as tearing down cancer because that is what Relay is all about. TI and Relay for Life in SL does it best!" Avariel commented, "I like the Fantasy Faire aproch of letting everything vanish into the mist."

And so, the Relay Weekend 2017 and it's sims have passed into history. But this is not the end of the Relay season just yet. Some teams are still having more events. This includes the Sunbeamers, whom are planning a celebration party this Sunday at 6PM at the Goblin Cave in the Pacific Waters sim. A spinoff event, the RFL Home, Castle, and Garden Expo is in just a few days, taking place on five sims on two levels. The opening ceremony at July 23 at 3PM, and it lasts to the end of the month.

For those who want to see screenshots of the Relay Weekend, there is the Relay for Life in Second Life Flickr page. Among the contributors, Wildstar Beaumont, IshtarAngel Micheline (Ishtarkiss), and Avariel Falcon. The Newser will try to have some more screenshots posted, soon.

Bixyl Shuftan

Second Life Newspaper's Website Offline

Since Second Life Newspaper closed it's doors, the website and it's archived stories, at least the Main and People sections, remained up as a record of people places and events in Second Life's middle years. At least it did until now. Checking the website this week, only the front page remained. The rest of the newsletter was down.

After three and a half years, almost as long as it was active, the old newspaper had finally vanished from the scene.

But all is not completely lost. Using the Internet Archive website (https://archive.org/web/), also known as the "Wayback Machine," one can still get a look at copies of the pages (link). It seems only the Main and People Sections still work, though. Other sections such as Red Light and M.A.C.E. are still gone.

Second Life Newspaper officially began as a blog in November 2007 by JamesT Juno, and within a year had emerged as Second Life's top newspaper with several sections. Dana Vanmoer was the editor for most of it's history. Real life difficulties would eventually force James and Dana to leave Second Life and close Second Life Newspaper. Most of the staff would form Second Life Newser, which continues to write to this day.

Bixyl Shuftan