Second Life News 2013-32 #2

There is no new news on server updates, rollouts are the same as yesterday. We did get new information on some of the changes to be running in Blue Steel Wednesday.

Stop Animating Me

The fix for VWR-13228Object can obtain and retain permissions indefinitely without avatar’s knowledge and no way of knowing who took it. It seems this is getting mixed up with the Viewer’s ‘Stop Animating Me’.

It is key to understand what Stop Animating Me was intended to do. Originally the idea was to fix a problem where you sat in chair and the teleported away or crashed out. Your animation state was saved and when you arrived or reclogged you posed (animated) as setting in a chair without a chair being present. Stop Animating me reset your animation state. But it only did this viewer side… and that is key. It ONLY reset your viewer. Others might still see you sitting even after you corrected the problem as far as you can tell. 

The update on the server will now respond to the Stop Animating Me menu item. It will you’re your permissions in objects within the region and revoke them. It will not affect your HUD’s and attachments. All other objects and other avatar attachments will lose your permissions.

Don’t expect this to work just now. The server code is on Blue Steal. But, a viewer change is needed that has not yet been released.

The purpose for this change to eliminate griefing like Soul Steal. It will give the user more control over their permissions.

And Stop Animating Me will still perform the same task viewer side of resetting your animation state. It is not going to clear your AO permissions or stop AO animations or animation from other items you may be wearing.

There is something about revoking permissions when an item is rezzed. I am foggy on that. But, a trick has been to take permissions by putting an object that has your permissions into inventory and then later rezzing it to control you. I think the system checks for that on item rez. Both getting items into your inventory that later change behavior when rezzed or a griefer taking them for later use have been problems.

Form the discussion there are some holds left, but this is an improvement.

Region Blocking Shutdown

When a region is restarting there are some new behaviors in Blue Steel. For one shutdown warning messages should now contain the region name. That will help. I sometimes teleport then notice I have chiclets pending and some of those are shutdown notices. I am left wondering if they came from the previous region or are also coming from the current region. Now, I’ll know.

Another change is blocking entry to the region during the last 60 seconds of the countdown. This will prevent you landing in a region that near shutdown.

Additionally during the last 60 seconds the region will be no rez. This should allow the region to save its state more reliably. Once the region saves state, changes after that are lost. Disallowing changes and then saving state should solve some problems.

Griefing

Andrew says he is pretty much finished with the Interest List changes. There are still viewer side changes that need to be made to take advantage of the Interest List stuff.

This frees Andrew up to go back on server maintenance. He will be focusing on fixes to stop griefer exploits. While we have seen a steady stream of fixes, Andrew will Likely make fixes that require more extensive changes to the system.

Group Bans

Baker Linden is still working on them. Viewer side stuff for now.

Baker tells us that a group ban will eject the person from the group as well as ban them. This means the robots that detect an eject and automatically rejoin will not be able to do so.

Baker explained his thinking on who can have ban rights saying, “Anyone with the ban ability can ban anyone else. My reasoning is that if you can’t trust an officer with banning, don’t let that person be an officer.” The other possibility he thought of is: “The other route I can go is anyone with the ban ability can ban anyone that doesn’t have that ability.” But, he sees problems with that similar to existing problems with the current eject feature.

Anyone with group ban ability can ban ANYONE in the group. This is a powerful tool.

One thought on “Second Life News 2013-32 #2

  1. Ugh, finally an attempt to fix the anim permission exploits. I tried years ago to fix this, but found that the only revoke that’s exposed to the viewer requires known the object’s ID that stole permissions got broken in a rollout while I was testing. I got Andrew to do a quick fix to some logic in message handler the Linden viewer apparently never used, but was by TPVs for revoking perms. No server Linden at the time wanted to or had time to address the larger exploits that were happening, but it seems someone is finally working on it. 😀

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