I woke up early this morning to begin working in Second Life, as I have done for about six months now since Metaverse Technology opened our headquarters there, to find that the grid is once again down. I spent about twenty minutes reading through then Linden blog, and the 323 comments that had been posted by the time I got to the end, and realized that this would be a good time to address all of these grid closures.
If you haven’t been following the story so far, let me catch you up. Second Life is a 3D virtual environment created and maintained by the residents, or at least that is the tag line. In many regards it is true. You can build 3D objects, from houses to cars to anything you can visualize, and endow these objects with functionality through a basic script programming language. One of the main draws of SL(Second Life) is that the virtual economy has a direct exchange rate to RL(Real Life) currency. Lindens to dollars, about 280 to 1 on today’s market exchange.
The Lindens, representatives from Linden Labs which is the parent company of Second Life, really try to let you do your own thing. That has been one of the problems this last month. With such a spirit of openness, including the recent removal of the credit card requirement for registration, the grid has been subject to recent attacks. Although that is not what is causing the grid closure today, and we’ll get to that in a moment, hackers have been responsible for at least three serious attacks this month, all causing grid closures. Basically they create some type of self replicating, self dispersing, grey goo in an attempt to overwhelm the servers. Either they are getting better at it, or the Lindens are slowing down, because the successful attacks are getting more frequent.
These aren’t the only problems that we are seeing on the grid. Spam attacks where objects repeatedly and continuously attempt to direct you to a website from with SL, Linden released patches that don’t operate as expected, and sporadic problems that can’t be associated with a single source. Today’s outage is due to a permission exploit, that could allow someone other then the owner to gain access to an object or a script. As a growing virtual economy, the permission system is the only intellectual property protection available, and therefore its integrity is crucial to SL success. It has been a rough month for all involved.
So what do most SL residence think about these issues? It really is difficult to say. As in any community the most vocal residents are often the most polarized. (I am generalizing as there are always exceptions and I am sure you are one of them.) The forums and blog comments are filled with the continuous flame wars on the nature of the Lindens, Saints vs. Demons. I’m not sure if any of that is helpful to the process, but it is good for communities to have outlets that are relatively benign. I’m sure the Lindens watch these outlets, but I certainly hope they don’t make business decisions because of them. The unfortunate problem is that it doesn’t matter what the current user base thinks of the problems. I know that sounds harsh, but listen to me for a minute.
For whatever reason, SL already has us hooked. We are the early adopters, and although many of us can’t count or stay in years yet, we do have an edge on the hundreds of million potential residents to come. If a brand new SL from another company came out tomorrow most of us wouldn’t change, but what we need to think about are the people that haven’t made the choice yet.
Second Life is at a crucial stage in its existence. RL media attention is getting fierce. I don’t think that we have gone a week without SL being in a major reputable RL publication or feed, and Wired has had an article every month for quite a while. Major corporations are beginning to take interest, and yes that comes with its own problems but usually means were going to have the luxury of arguing about it for a lot longer. My favorite barometric of SL spreading to the masses is how easy is it to explain SL to others. No it’s not just a game exactly, yes it is a MMORG sort of, lindens are a real currency, no it’s not ebay. The truth of the matter is that the next 12 months will very likely determine the long term success or failure of Second Life. It will either continue it’s existence as a quaint little virtual experience, whose numbers are kept small by these mitigating factors, or it will explode into millions and millions of residents with a virtual economy that will give federal governments around the world indigestion.
I don’t think you have to wonder which option I place my vote on, but the cold hard truth is that this is up to the Lindens. I’m not saying that they can just wake up one day and say, oh maybe we would like to succeed. Or that even if they do everything right, we are all going to make it to the promise land. What I am saying is that if they don’t do something more we are certainly not going to make it.
I think that the Lindens have done, and are doing an amazing job. The complexity and scaling of such an endeavor is unimaginable. The commitment to openness means that certain problems will always have to be dealt with, and they are pushing the limits is realms that haven’t been explored before. Without the Lindens we would be having this conversation. Having said that, they have to do more, and they have to do it soon.
There has to be a better way to repel malicious grid attacks. I don’t think going back to credit card registration is the solution, but perhaps some type of targeted response is necessary. I certainly don’t profess to have a understanding of the millions of lines of code, that I have never seen, required to run SL, but there has to be a tiered response capability. If the Lindens declare a grid attack, all non-verified users and their objects are shutdown immediately. The next step would be residents with less then six months are also locked down until the attack is over. There has to be something.
The issue that I think the Lindens have the most control over is the update process and the permission exploits. If you have too, slow down the update process. If it means that the grid is going to be off again on again for days after every update, the new features are not worth the hassle. Test longer. I don’t know what to say, there is a reason why IT people don’t like Microsoft.
In the end what are you going to do? Second Life is the closest thing to the Metaverse currently in existence, and we are terribly excited about the possibilities. We are here to stay, and will help in any way that we can.
