Omega Point

And we’re back!

I’ve noted on sev­eral occas­sions that I only ever get to upgrade my com­puter when some­thing very bad hap­pens to it and I have to replace parts. This tends to hap­pen once or twice a year, in my expe­ri­ence. As such, my desk­top has now made the jump to PCI Express video — to my annoy­ance. While I can’t help but be impressed by the increased per­for­mance, I also can’t help but be annoyed that I was forced to do this at all.

Regard­less, I am back for good this time. Really.

In my absence, it seems there’s been some long-awaited changes to the group tools, a topic I’m very eager to talk about shortly.

In LSL news, the changed() event has been fixed to han­dle cases in which a script is dropped on an object, as has llGetScript­Name. Addi­tional bugs have been dis­cov­ered in changed() as well, lend­ing fur­ther cre­dence to my the­ory that it’s actu­ally been an elab­o­rate hoax on the part of Cory Lin­den all along. This time, it’s been the tele­port and region-crossing detec­tion func­tion­al­ity that’s bro­ken. Scripters, make sure you put your essen­tial scripts in root prims!

Updates pending

I’ll be back among the land of the functional-computer-owning late tomor­row evening. In the mean­time, I’d like to note that my traf­fic stats indi­cate that the num­ber of vis­its this blog gets really don’t appear to vary at all. Includ­ing when I don’t post.

I prob­a­bly will any­way, but still…

Exploit reporting stats

On the Lin­den Blog, Brent Lin­den dis­cusses the exper­i­men­tal exploit-reporting sys­tem launched in the wake of Cris­tiano Midnight’s dis­cov­ery of (and sub­se­quent sus­pen­sion for pub­li­ciz­ing) an exploit in which it was pos­si­ble for any user to do Very Bad Things.

Under the exper­i­men­tal sys­tem, Brent is now paged every time some­one used the SL bug report tool (Help > Report Bug) to report a bug flagged with “Exploit”. How­ever, as he notes:

Since intro­duc­ing the new Exploit hot­line to Brent Lin­den, we’ve got­ten 55 bugs marked ‘Exploit’ and only 6 have actu­ally been issues con­sid­ered exploits.

He goes on to list some of the exam­ples of reports that Lin­den most def­i­nitely does not con­sider worth wak­ing him up at 3am. Inter­est­ingly, a cou­ple seem to actu­ally be the result of hon­est con­fu­sion about a difficult-to-use fea­ture, and not just igno­rance on the part of the senders: “It says my par­cel is full! 367/367 prims! This is an exploit, right?”

Ezhar Fairlight, Close Per­sonal Friend to the man­age­ment here at Omega Point, con­tributed this bit of smar­tassery:

So what you are say­ing is that when­ever some­body files a bugre­port under the cat­e­gory “exploit” you get alerted imme­di­ately? Isn’t that exploitable by itself? It leaves you vul­ner­a­ble to a DoS attack on your sleep and thus your work per­for­mance. You should fix that exploit. Shall I file an exploit report about it? :)

Yes, good work, Ezhar. That will undoubt­edly be much appreciated.

That’s not a good prize!

Sadly, my computer’s not doing as awe­somely as one might hope. Light blog­ging to follow…

Sally Linden on the “Residents” statistic

On the Lin­den Blog today, Sally Lin­den writes:

There has lately been much con­fu­sion and spec­u­la­tion sur­round­ing the “Res­i­dents” sta­tis­tic on the home page of http://secondlife.com. This post is an effort to clear that up.

She goes on to say:

…there was an inter­nal con­ver­sa­tion about the num­ber we were report­ing, what the Res­i­dents thought it rep­re­sented, and how we could be more trans­par­ent. The num­ber that is cur­rently on our home page is a time-weighted aver­age between “total num­ber of signups ever” and “total num­ber of logged in users over the last 60 days”. As of right now, those num­bers are 493,563 and 225,028.

And most usefully:

We plan to change the home page to dis­play those two num­bers sep­a­rately. At that time the cur­rent “Res­i­dents” num­ber will be removed. This change should take place some­time next week.

I’d really be inter­ested in see­ing the total num­ber of suc­cess­ful unique logins in the pre­vi­ous 24 hours as well. We’ll see what the response is.

NY Times on AOL search log leak

The New York Times describes how they iden­ti­fied a woman from Lil­burn, Geor­gia based on her sort-of/maybe/accidentally leaked-on-purpose-but-it’s-for-researchers– and-also-those-responsible-have-been-sacked AOL search data. They imply that this was due to clever leg­work and don’t actu­ally say that she typed in her Social Secu­rity num­ber, but there are cer­tainly plenty of exam­ples of searchers who did.

And finally, because you’re appar­ently sup­posed to do so in news arti­cles and blog posts about this leak, here are some enter­tain­ing searches to amuse your­selves with while con­demn­ing AOL for hav­ing invaded these people’s privacy:

Between 9:15 and 9:40 AM, user 12276808 searches for:

• ejac­u­la­tor
• ejac­u­la­tor vacuum
• milk machine
• milk­ing devices
• cow milk­ing devices

User 2643851 searches for:

• hotmail.com
• car parts
• effect of eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mony on wrong­ful convictions
• the eye­wit­ness lab­o­ra­tory depart­ment of psy­col­ogy uni­ver­sity of texas at el paso
• the amer­i­can psy­chol­ogy association
• sexy girls
• google

And finally, the smug, leaked-data-referencing clos­ing stat­ment: That last search may have been a bet­ter option.

Miguel de Icaza on the LSL-to-Mono port

Mono project founder Miguel de Icaza writes about Lin­den Lab’s pre­sen­ta­tion at Lang.NET 2006 in which Cory and Bab­bage Lin­den described the upcom­ing move to the Mono CLI.

The chal­lenge is to stop and save a run­ning script. This is some­thing that is rel­a­tively easy done with their script­ing lan­guage, but it becomes trick­ier with the CLI.

Their imple­men­ta­tion instru­ments the gen­er­ated CIL assem­bly to allow any script to sus­pend itself and resume exe­cu­tion on demand. This is a bit like con­tin­u­a­tions, the main dif­fer­ence is that the script does not con­trol when it is sus­pended, the run­time does. The instru­men­ta­tion basi­cally checks on every back-branch and on every call site whether the script should stop (in Jim’s words, “even­tu­ally, you run out of method, or you run out of stack”) and if it must stop, it jumps to the end of the method where a lit­tle stub has been injected that saves the state in a helper class and returns.

A very clever idea. Hope­fully the slides for the pre­sen­ta­tion will be posted soon.

I’d very much like to have attended that pre­sen­ta­tion, and I’d be inter­ested in see­ing those slides as well.

Fol­low­ing my attorney’s advise I have obtained a Sec­ond Life account.

Wel­come to Sec­ond Life, Miguel!

(Link stolen from Baba Sucks.)

Verified Accounts and Trust Metrics — Part 1

Part 1: Inter­na­tional Users

Two months ago, Sec­ond Life cre­ator Lin­den Lab removed the credit card require­ment from the account cre­ation process, allow­ing users with­out a credit card to join SL for the first time. While the move was met with alarm and oppo­si­tion among many mem­bers of the SL com­mu­nity, it was part of an ongo­ing plan to open access to Sec­ond Life, a plan which has been opposed by many vocal res­i­dents at nearly every step of the way, their out­rage then for­got­ten as the next phase has been unveiled.

In a blog post shortly after the ini­tial announce­ment, Com­mu­nity VP Robin Lin­den attempted to explain Lin­den Lab’s posi­tion, ratio­nale and intended secu­rity mea­sures, address­ing the gen­eral opin­ion among the Sec­ond Life forums’ users. Forums being what they are, she was likely only partly suc­cess­ful in get­ting this mes­sage across to Sec­ond Life’s vocal minority.

Regard­less of res­i­dent oppo­si­tion, the pol­icy was changed, and reg­is­tra­tion was opened up to every­one. With broad­band. And a fast com­puter. And ade­quate man­ual dex­ter­ity. And who could com­mu­ni­cate in Eng­lish to some degree. So while per­haps not the vast major­ity that the most opti­mistic peo­ple pre­dicted, it was cer­tainly about to become more acces­si­ble to users out­side Canada, the US, Aus­tralia and the UK, thus fit­ting in with Linden’s plans to expand Sec­ond Life’s user base into Asia and Europe.

So, after two months of open reg­is­tra­tion, has Lin­den Lab’s plan been suc­cess­ful? Obvi­ously, with Japan­ese and Korean job post­ings on Lin­den Lab’s employ­ment page, and the recent move to an XML-based client UI –allow­ing for the sim­ple pro­duc­tion of trans­lated clients– we can assume that the “Open SL” mas­ter plan is not yet completed.

But what has tran­spired in the interim? Accord­ing to Chro­mal Brodsky’s Sec­ond Life Pop­u­la­tion Sta­tis­tics site, the num­ber of total accounts has jumped sharply since reg­is­tra­tions were made free in April, and manda­tory account ver­i­fi­ca­tion was removed in June, with over 370,000 accounts reg­is­tered as of this writ­ing. How­ever, as Chromal’s site indi­cates, the growth of peak con­cur­rent logins over the last year is barely even per­cep­ti­ble as a curve.

We can inter­pret this dis­crep­ancy in sev­eral ways, all of which are likely involved to vary­ing degrees:

• That far more alt accounts are being made and not used con­cur­rently with the exist­ing resident’s main account.
• That peak con­cur­rent logins have been largely unchanged, due to the demo­graph­ics of Sec­ond Life’s user base. This means the num­ber only reflects peak logins for North Amer­i­cans. While anec­do­tal obser­va­tions indi­cate Euro­peans and South Amer­i­cans are now join­ing SL in vastly increased num­bers, Chromal’s graphs don’t cur­rently indi­cate whether or not there are more unique logins per day, nor whether logins are higher at typ­i­cally peak hours for users from other time zones.
• More users are cre­at­ing accounts, but are not able to run the client.
• More users are suc­cess­fully cre­at­ing accounts, but do not use SL as fre­quently as typ­i­cal active users do. This may be due to sev­eral factors:
• Users who may not oth­er­wise have cared enough to try SL are join­ing, but use SL more casually.
• Non-English-speaking users cre­ate accounts, but do not find enough peo­ple that speak their lan­guage to inter­act with to make them want to stay as long.
• New res­i­dents per­cieve SL’s value as being lower. If some­one pays $10 for an account, they will likely think of it dif­fer­ently than if they give a credit card num­ber, or than if they do nei­ther. This behav­ior may also be due to the sunk cost fal­lacy: if the $10 reg­is­tra­tion cost can be viewed as an invest­ment, some­one may still want to use SL to “get their money’s worth”. They may be less will­ing to do this if the account hasn’t actu­ally cost them anything.

Hard data aside, what anec­do­tal evi­dence is there to sup­port an increase in the num­ber of inter­na­tional users?

As a long­time mem­ber of the Sec­ond Life Men­tor group, I’ve taught classes, answered ques­tions, mostly about script­ing, and gen­er­ally been sub­ject to much Men­tor group IM spam. Since the removal of credit card ver­i­fi­ca­tion, I’ve noticed a huge increase in the num­ber of requests for assis­tance on Help Island, the “wad­ing pool” SL new­bies can use to get their bear­ings for a few min­utes or a few days before tak­ing the plunge to the big kid pool of the main­land. These are now mostly requests for trans­la­tors who speak Span­ish, Turk­ish, Russ­ian, or a dozen other languages.

While obvi­ously I’m not privy to the spe­cific num­bers, the fact that the bulk of Men­tor IM seems now to be requests for mul­ti­lin­gual men­tors effec­tively demon­strates that the removal of credit card ver­i­fi­ca­tion has suc­ceeded in at least one of its goals, and one I whole­heart­edly support.

Update, August 7, 6:15 PM: Chro­mal has gra­ciously pro­vided all avail­able data from the past 13 months, and notes that while the peak con­cur­rency rate has risen from 2127 in June 2005 to 8357 in August 2006, the min­i­mum con­cur­rency rate has risen from 647 to 3671 in that same period.

The max­i­mum num­ber of con­cur­rent logins is 3.93 times higher than it was 13 months ago, while the min­i­mum is now 5.67 times higher. Inter­est­ing stuff.

Next…
Ver­i­fied Accounts and Trust Met­rics Part 2: What Went Wrong?

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Wel­come to Omega Point, a pretentiously-named blog about vir­tual worlds, the evo­lu­tion of the meta­verse, and the Singularity.

I’m Cather­ine Omega – and yes, that’s a pseu­do­nym. It’s not much of a pseu­do­nym though, if that helps. If you’re a user of Sec­ond Life, you might have heard my name, per­haps even favourably. If you’ve ever scripted any­thing in Sec­ond Life, you almost cer­tainly know who I am. If there aren’t any other posts on this blog yet, you def­i­nitely do.

The first rule of learn­ing about Cather­ine Omega: Don’t google Cather­ine Omega. Google is full of per­ni­cious lies and mis­quotes. Really. That, and stuff that’s accu­rate and that you should ignore as well. There’s also a video. Don’t watch that either.

That said, I’m one of the old­est res­i­dents in Sec­ond Life. I co-founded and con­tinue to edit the LSL Wiki, an accom­plish­ment that means absolutely noth­ing out­side the Sec­ond Life script­ing com­mu­nity. Because of these two facts, I have at times been mis­taken for an author­ity on cer­tain top­ics, which is why I was nudged into start­ing a blog in the first place.

So here it is.