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Second Life Hit By Massive In-Game Worm
An anonymous reader writes, "At 2:46 CST today, the game Second Life was hit by a massive attack by a rogue programmer. Spinning gold rings began to appear in the air and on the ground, and as users interacted with them they began to chase and replicate. Apparently, most people are willing to touch an object they've never seen before and this invoked a worm script that was designed to multiply and spread across the 2,700+ servers run by Linden Labs in California, the game's owner. Many of the six hundred thousand active users experienced serious lag and lost connectivity to the servers, making it one of the largest known denial-of-service attacks in an online game. Linden Labs had to invoke martial law and lock out all logins by users except their staff as they began the task of cleaning the servers of what they began to term 'the grey goo.'" Comments in the SL blog entry indicate that Linden Labs had already deployed a "grey goo fence" before this worm struck, but someone found a hole in it.
Now what they need is some sort of illness that affects characters temporarily, just like real life! Imagine, your character gets a cold and slows down and sneezes every once in a while. Or hey, you go kiss another character (if that's possible) and your character gets infected with herpes! Wouldn't that be fun? Oh wait - that was me last weekend. Damn.
Proof that all it takes to kill the Internet is something shiny.
Second Life as the worm turns.
Wow, so now they're blaming it on a "worm"... ok. SL is like watching an MMO flipbook, the packet-loss is phenomenal while they continue to supposedly attract corporations and live-weather map projects, host in-game advertising and I'm sure making money off people somehow with Linden cash transfers. Buy some freaking servers, or get rid of the 2,700 solar-powered calculators currently running the thing.
I'm fighting The War on Drugs!
Hey Kid, Want to try some Snow Crash?
SL is full of pervs
Like my Mom always used to say: "Don't take virtual candy from virtual strangers".
Table-ized A.I.
"Real Life" is all 1's and 0's at a fundamental level, as well... so what is your point, besides the one on top of your head?
Idiot.
honey, we shrunk the secondlife-kids...
Jesus Saves
It looks like the admins now have a "second job"....
Sonic the Hedgehog!
I submit that anybody who posts to Slashdot about the other people's need to "get a life" should spontaneously explode from sheer force of concentrated hypocrisy.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Sonic and Tails!
- Shadow
...to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.
Take life easy: one bit at a time.
Uh oh, I think SkyNet just became self-aware... of its Second Life account.
... and then they built the supercollider.
It's not just the content, it's also the presentation:
"...Linden Labs in California, the game's owner."
Do Second Life users also grab at modifiers that are dangled in front of them?
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Well, it was modded "redundant." Obviously everyone was thinking it.
Swi
"Apparently, most people are willing to touch an object they've never seen before"
You should be so lucky.
Take one look at some of the screenshots from that game and *boom* say byebye to your cerebral cortex. Think of the ugliest possible art stretched into three dimensions doing things that would make Japanese tentacle monsters say "Hey, that just ain't right".
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
If you get 100 rings do you turn into Super-Sonic? ^_^
i don't mind it, as long a people remember that its really just a glorified chat program with scripts, ie irc with a gui /fish
In that same vein, I would mind this WWW thing a lot less, if people remember that it's really just a glorified Gopher program with scripts...
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
These days playing Second Life with talking animals in sexual situations is bound to give you a virtual STD. Actually I am kind of surprised the first in-game worm is not transmitted though sex between players. That would create a nice Linden buck market in virtual condoms.
Apparently you are unaware of the millions of CS kiddies who cry when the Steam servers go down, but maybe that is not getting huffy either.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
For that to be true you have to count logging (and pissing) off Second Life players as "harm".
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
you go kiss another character (if that's possible) and your character gets infected with herpes
Genitals are manufactured objects in Second Life, but your normal face's lips are not, so genitals will almost always carry scripts of their own.
This means that kissing another character is unlikely to be a vector for viral infection, but there's a related activity that could easily do this.
Incidentally, waxing your carrot can of course trigger any scripted action in the object, so climax can be rather more visually impressive in Second Life than in your first one.
Next week: "How viruses and trojans prove that e-mail will never be used as a business tool".
But the graphics made the web better than Gopher (or WAIS). The graphics led to pr0n.
Layne