Slashdot Mirror
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.
Yeah, pointless acts of mass malice have come to Second Life. Now it really IS just like the real world.
Proof that all it takes to kill the Internet is something shiny.
First off, there were only about 14,000 people on the system at the time, not 600,000 as indicated in the summary. Second, while they did lock out new logins, it should be pointed out that any user who was currently online was not kicked off - and the period of "martial law" lasted about 20 minutes.
Of course, if there were 600,000 users on at the same time, the "game" would be unplayable - it's tough enough when it gets over about 10,000 right now.
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
Second Life as the worm turns.
Now we have CopyBot and grey goo and it seems like SL is just another dodgy online game after all.
What? No Screenshot from anybody?
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
Calling it a 'worm' is kind of a stretch. It does not affect your local computer, it affects the view of the world in your local client. It doesn't run code on your computer, it just adds extra "in-game" items that automatically duplicate themselves and clog the Tubes.
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
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!
This reads like something from Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash".
I never thought we'd get real systems vulnerable to attacks with 3D visual components as an integral part of the attack. This is much closer to SF than expected.
Is there a video?
Hey Kid, Want to try some Snow Crash?
Nice hack. Kudos to whomever pulled it off. The videogame generation is in danger of becoming a legion of conformist, rule-following lab mice, conditioned to obey and consume, differentiated only by which Big Media corporation they swear allegiance to. It's good to see someone somewhere is sowing discord. Eris would be pleased, but then who gives a fuck what she thinks ;P
How does this work in these games that someone is ever allowed to inject a code that can run on someone elses session?
Second Life users are able to create objects using a fairly complete scripting language. The scripts run on the servers, and an object can create more objects when somebody interacts with it. It "runs" in other peoples' sessions not because it's running on their system but because they're all viewing the same MMORPG environment.
And to preempt your inevitable comment, yes, it is very lame. I can't believe people are paying ongoing fees (in US dollars) to hold land in this thing.
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.
every object you create in SL can have scripts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linden_Scripting_Lang uage added to them, that fire on different events, ie touch, never ending loops or the right click menu etc.
/fish
some of the commands let you create/spawn (i cant think of the word they use) other objects, like rain, or stars that follow you as you fly around. These objects in turn can have there own scripts too.
i don't know my self how they normally stop never ending loops of created objects other than them asking people nicely not to do it.
Some people have asked to able to disable the scripts but this, i think would have a to greater effects as every thing, doors, cars, lifts, dance club lights etc use the scripts.
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
Sonic and Tails!
- Shadow
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.
Huh? By definition a worm is a self replicating program or algorithm that causes harm, even if only by using bandwidth, network, or computer resources.
That is exactly what this worm did.
I found a screenshot over at Snapzilla.
BroadbandPig
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."
The problem is that the world is Zone Based, meaning each server is responsible for a equal size geographic portion of the world. The result is that processing power is spread evenly over the whole world. The problem is that people like to congregate causing some geographic areas to have more players, and other servers to have none. Where you have more players, you have more work for the server causing everything on that server to slow down. So the result is that the places players most want to be are also the places with the greatest lag. The unfortunate result is that many players have a negative experience right away.
Really, the whole server architecture needs to be reworked to behave more like a proper cluster, but that is too large of a change to ever consider implementing without starting over from scratch.
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543