A New Attack
There are offline HTTP griefing attacks now. These force a region to drop all users. As a user, report HTTP attacks to support as off-line griefing. With that qualification the report is bumped to operations from support. Filing an AR is the best way to get a fast response. Additional information can be added in a JIRA, but you need to refer to that JIRA in the AR.
aummm by [ keke ] by Kean Kelly ☂, on Flickr
These attacks are high risk for the griefer. Linden Lab works with the ISP to stop the attack. The ISP has the griefers RL ID. If the ISP bans them, cutting of their Internet access, it is a significant problem for them.
There are ways to spoof who you are. One of which is why it is important to have secured your wireless access point. It has to be secured with some type of password access.
Cache
I’ve never thought the Viewer’s cache system was ever all that good. It’s been 2 or more years since the Lab worked on the cache. When they did it was a significant improvement. But, I still wait minuets for my viewer to download load and render my home at each login or TP home. I expect that to be fastest render of any place I visit. After all I am landing in my home 2 or more times per login secession.
Oz Linden thinks a deep study of the viewer’s caching will reveal possible improvements. The Lab simply can’t assign people to that project for now. He and I think it would be great if a third party developer would improve the viewer’s caching. I would love to have a viewer with a cache that actually loaded previously downloaded items from cache.
The addition of CDN (Content Delivery Network) seems to have aggravated the problem. I am guessing when the CDN’s cache is cold, the viewer waits until the CDN verifies the cache date on an item is current and unchanged. This means the CDN has to download the items while I wait for something already in my cache. So, I am convinced there is considerable room for improvement.
New Clean Install Process
One of the basic steps in a clean install has been removal of the viewer cache. That is changing. The FS Team is trying out a clean install process that retains the cache and only removes the settings and program files.
I think that makes good sense for the SL and Firestorm viewers as they both use Kakado for the JPG2000 image compression and decompression. I am less sure about how good that idea is for other third party viewers.
I suppose I need to rewrite my clean install instructions…
Group Chat
The Lindens are satisfied enough with group chat at this point that they have pulled off it to work on other things. They do plan to return to Chat Improvement later in the year.
New Stuff Coming
The Lindens aren’t talking about the new things they call exciting projects they expect to start on in May and/or June. They are hinting there is new stuff coming for classic avatars. Nothing specific. But, the hint came out in a discussion of what things they weren’t working on as the reason why.
Looks like I am finally forced out of SL after 8 years of being a resident. I won’t switch from my secure and easy to use Linux to an insecure and buggy Windows that is in bed with the NSA. Oz says there is an extremly low number of Linux users in SL. Strange I know so many, about 20% of my friends in here use it and they are all very heavy users and content creators. I am glad High Fidelity provides a Linux flavour.
Linux user do tend to cluster to together. So, I’m not surprised you know several Linux users. But, is that 20% of the people you know put the count into 3 digits? That is a small number.
You don’t have to give up using Linux based viewers. You likely just won’t want to use a Linden built one.
thanks for the CEF update, Nalates, I hope there’s a project viewer soon .
I have been in SL from 2006 just recently lost interest because not much changed. The population is decreasing and all places look basically the same like they did few years ago. Mesh was the last greater improvement but also brought problems concerning lag and viewers and has to my experience messed up clothing. Stuff like alpha layers to fix poke-through make it complicated, it doesn’t always go well with sculpt- or prim-attachments and so on.
However being that long active in SL makes me looking forward for a complete next generation platform and I think that is the right thing to do for Lindens. I also hope that they solve a lot of problems that are buried deep in SL code and learn from their (plenty) mistakes in the past.
I just miss news about the development. It’s hard to find anything and you find nothing when you are not explicitly looking for it. Lindens should use the opportunity and make people hot for improvements in NGP to gather new interest in SL as a whole. Lindens could tease people so much with this but the tech news are clueless about SL and most younger people probably have never heard about it at all.