Trump Twitter Ban Raises Questions About Roles and Responsibilities of Social Media

 

It's been about a week since US President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter. Trump has been a controversial figure in American politics, and his takedown from the social media platform was greeted with applause by his opponents and criticism by his supporters. But some, including people whom have been critical of Trump in the past, expressed concerns about him being removed. The head of Twitter himself felt while they did the right thing, the move could have repercussions in the future for free speech online.

Read more in Other Grids, MMOs, and Games.

Derpyland Closes

Some sad news for pony fans. The Derpyland sim has closed down. It went offline sometime today, Saturday August 24 being the last full day it was online.

Talking to Amehana Arashi, she told me the sim owner has been having money troubles for some time, and last month the tier had been paid for him by a friend. "We had tried in private to help him find ways to keep it up," she explained, saying nostalgia was the big reason the sim remained up for as long as it has, "... but this just couldn't continue." She did say there was an offer made to rebuild part of the sim in Trotsdale.

Derpyland was up for about eight years, and boasted an amusement park with rides, shops, and a club with a karaoke bar. The latter had events up to a couple nights ago. Ironically, checking out the sim last night, the roller coaster was on fire as if an omen about the sim's future.

While there are some pony sims left, the end of Derpyland means no others are next to Trotsdale.

In real life media, this is the last year the "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" cartoon has a new season, the show coming to an end after nine seasons.

Addition: Amehana has requested that any inquiries as to if Derpyland will be renting the parcels offered in Trotsdale go to Shippo849 Resident (Dashy), "It's in Shippo's hands to decide to accept the offer or not."

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.

Hurricane Michael Makes Landfall On Florida Panhandle Today

A month after Hurricane Florence threatened the East Coast, another storm is threatening to knock out power to thousands: Hurricane Michael. With winds up to 130 mph around it's eye, it was upgraded to Category Three and forecast to go to Category Four. Hurricane warnings are across the Florida panhandle, and tropical storm watches go all the way from the Louisiana border to Tampa. The storm is projected to go northeast, with over half of Georgia having storm warnings, and tropical storm watches extending well into North Carolina.

The storm has the potential to knock out power over a wide area, with the Florida panhandle and southern Georgia hardest hit. But unlike Hurricane Florence, the storm is faster moving and will not linger as long. So power should be restored quicker (though as some friends will tell you, there's always that one block that the power company takes their sweet time). So if you have online friends in this area, they might be offline for a little while.

Bixyl Shuftan

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

Unscheduled Maintenance Keeps Residents Offline During Clubs' Prime Time

Yesterday evening, about the time when a number of clubs have their events, residents began having trouble logging on. It turned out that Linden Lab was doing a round of "Unscheduled Maintenance" on the Second Life grid.

We are performing an unscheduled maintenance to our login systems. Residents may experience log in issues in world as well as secondlife.com. Please keep an eye on this blog for status updates. 

The trouble, according to their Grid Status Report, had started well before prime time for the clubs, the Linden Lab made the decision to do the maintenance at 5:33 PM SL time. But it would take a couple hours for the Lab to find the problem, and so residents continued have trouble logging on. And if they were on, they were advised against rezzing anything non-copyable or making any money transactions, including Marketplace or club tips.

Eventually, venues around Second Life, including the Furry Fashion Lounge and Club Cutlass, began calling off their events.

Tonight's Lounge event (Rave) is being canceled, due to the second life outages. the grid status is still being monitored, but has not changed.  So it's in our best interest. It will be rescheduled in the near future. For now we will continue monitoring grid status, and it's suggested to refrain from building, scripting, or buying/selling until this is resolved.

Sorry about the Wed Dance at Cutlass, but no one could log in the run the boards.  So I just killed the contest for tonight.  We can try again another night, when LL has it's sh*t together.

Finally at 8:08PM SL time, eight minutes after these and other clubs' events would normally be over, Linden Lab declared the problem fixed and the Grid was back to normal.

Unscheduled Maintenances do not happen often on Second Life these days. In August, one of the Lindens came forward to apologize after the one then. Though with this one coming not long after one in late August, a few residents might wonder what's going on. Still, the outages are less frequent, and shorter, than Second Life's early days when the Grid was closed down for half a day or longer a few days a month, the Lab posting picture in self-depreciating humor of apes hitting a monolith with bones, "The Grid is down while we bang on things." So while what happened was annoying an inconvenient, it wasn't as bad as it used to be.

Bixyl Shuftan

Login Issues Keep Many Residents Offline

 For those trying to get on at around 4-5PM SL time yesterday, they likely saw something like the "login failed" message to the left. Glitches in the gird were once again messing with things, and the Lab had started a round of "unscheduled maintenance." People could still stay online, but those out were staying out.

A number of events were disrupted or canceled. On the official forums, there was a thread with several pages worth of comments about the problem, people complaining about not being able to log in, "I love how the official status page describes an almost complete inability by anyone to log in anywhere as 'Degraded Performance.' " Finally at 5:38, Linden Lab posted they had resolved the login issues, with the announcement about billing issues twenty minutes later.

But not all residents would be able to get back online. As it turned out, Comcast was having some service outages over parts of the country.For customers of the service, that added to their difficulties.

Earlier in Second Life's history, such outages occurred frequently. For hours, no one would be able to log on at all, while the Lindens posted a notice on the website, "The grid is down while we bang on things." More recently, disruption on this scale have been less common. On August 23 last year, residents were unable to log in for a few hours and some were disconnected. This time, April Linden came forward and apologized for the Lab. It was a rare moment the words "we're sorry" were heard from the Lindens.

Bixyl Shuftan

Hurricane Mathew Threatens US East Coast

Some residents of Second Life are finding real life will likely cut off their connection for a while. Hurricane Mathew, a storm that delivered death and destruction in Haiti and the Bahamas, is heading to Florida as a highly dangerous Category Four hurricane, making impact there today. But instead of making landfall there, it looks like it will brush the East Coast that while slowly lessening in strength will still be destructive. Evacuations are already being ordered in Georgia, and North and South Carolina have declared emergencies.

For Second Life residents in the storm's path, a likely consequence is the cutoff of electric power, and being cut off from Second Life/ Already at least one DJ living in Florida sent a notice to the clubs she performs at that she will be offline indefinitely due to the certain loss of power.

As a few of the Newser's writers live in areas likely to be affected by the storm, there is a chance stories could be delayed, possibly updates in general to the Newser as yours truly the editor is among them. So for now, it's wait and see, making sure there's enough emergency supplies on hand, and taking any calls to evacuate seriously.

Bixyl Shuftan

April Linden Explains Tuesday's Grid Problems, "We're Sorry About This Outage"

As some of you already know, there were some problems with the Second Life Grid on Tuesday. For a while around Noon and the early afternoon, residents were unable to log in and some were being logged out. At the time, Linden Lab posted an "Unscheduled Maintenance" notice at 11:03 AM stating this, and asking residents to temporarily stop making purchases inworld and buying Lindens.

We are aware that some users are currently being logged out, and all users are currently unable to log in to Second Life. Additionally, please refrain from transacting on the LindeX on in-world as purchases are likely to fail. Some regions are also unavailable at this time, and teleports to other regions may fail currently. We have identified the issue causing this situation and are currently working to resolve it. Please monitor this blog for additional updates.

It was 2:49 PM when they finally gave the all-clear. A few residents I talked to later mentioned the downtime. One would later tell me adjustments she had made at the time while she was going through a number of sets of clothes had been undone, and wondered if what was going on with the Grid had something to do with it.

Several years ago, downtimes happened regularly. With the sometimes self-depreciating humor of the days of Philip Linden, they'd post a picture parodying the monolith and apes scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, "The Grid Is Down While We Bang On Things." Today, downtimes are much less frequent. And this time, April Linden decided to make a statement the following day explaining what happened.

Shortly after 10:30am, the master node of one of the central databases crashed. This is the same type of crash we’ve experienced before, and we handled it in the same way. We shut down a lot of services (including logins) so we could bring services back up in an orderly manner, and then promptly selected a new master and promoted it up the chain. This took roughly an hour, as it usually does.

A few minutes before 11:30am we started the process of restoring all services to the Grid. When we enabled logins, we did it in our usual method - turning on about half of the servers at once. Normally this works out as a throttle pretty well, but in this case, we were well into a very busy part of the day. Demand to login was very high, and the number of Residents trying to log in at once was more than the new master database node could handle.

Around noon we made the call to close off logins again and allow the system to cool off. While we were waiting for things to settle down we did some digging to try to figure out what was unique about this failure, and what we’ll need to do to prevent it next time.

We tried again at roughly 12:30pm, doing a third of the login hosts at a time, but this too was too much. We had to stop on that attempt and shut down all logins again around 1:00pm.

On our third attempt, which started once the system cooled down again, we took it really slowly, and brought up each login host one at a time. This worked, and everything was back to normal around 2:30pm.

My team is trying to figure out why we had to turn the login servers back on much more slowly than in the past. We’re still not sure. It’s a pretty interesting challenge, and solving hard problems is part of the fun of running Second Life.
Voice services also went down around this time, but for a completely unrelated reason. It was just bad luck and timing.

We did have one bright spot! Our status blog handled the load of thousands of Residents checking it all at once much better. We know it wasn’t perfect, but it showed much improvement over the last central database failure, and we’ll keep getting better 

My team takes the stability of Second Life very seriously, and we’re sorry about this outage. We now have a new challenging problem to solve, and we’re on it.

"We're sorry." Not words that we hear from Linden Lab every day. But this time, it's on the record that they spoke them.

Hat Tip: Inara Pey

Bixyl Shuftan

Insilico Offline, Owner Skills Hak Banned

Some sad news for science-fiction roleplayers in Second Life. The popular Insilico region, mentioned in media such as the Drax Files and written about by the Newser last year, has been taken offline. The reason, it's owner and primary builder, Skills Hak, has been banned from the Grid by Linden Lab.

Skills, whom has been involved in controversies such as being among those Linden Lab asked to resign from the Emerald Viewer team just before it collapsed in 2010, has stated she feels this will probably be the end of her activities in Second Life, at least under her current identity.

I had a good run. 8 years on this account and the timing of my ban couldn’t have been better. In fact my boyfriend was really happy to hear about my final ban since i am spending too much time at the computer and i am going to be a mommy soon. It was a wild ride, thanks for everything.

Some good news for Skills, Linden Lab is compensating her for the ban.

... i’ve been emailing back and forth with Linden Lab for a bit and i just agreed to accept a one time payment that will recoup my losses (although, technically i didn’t lose any money). It was more than i expected, they showed good faith and i will leave them alone now, promise.

In New World Notes, where the story was also reported on, several readers reminded about another community that had been offlined, Steelhead, due to it's owner being suspended for completely unknown reasons despite not being involved in any controversy, and paying more in tier than Insilico.

As for Insilico, their blog stated negotiations were in progress for a transfer of ownership to keep the region of several years alive. But the last post made suggests they might not proceed and the area could be allowed to pass away. Regardless whether one considers Skills Hak a hero or villain, the Grid is facing the loss of another prized region and community.

Bixyl Shuftan