DNS Changer Virus

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Everyone in the media is making a big deal of the DNS Changer Virus. If you have it, you will drop off the net in a few days when the virus kicks in.

If you have an anti-virus program and it is working, try doing a manual scan, then you are likely OK… like 99% certain to be OK.

You can visit a rather lame page to test whether you are infected. If it gives a positive result, you DO have a problem. Visit: http://www.dcwg.org/detect/. This is the page mainstream news media is sending people to.

The problem with it is: it does not definitively test whether you have the virus or not. Your ISP could be unintentionally hiding the problem. So, only the positive result is definitive. However, the site has a FIX for the problem.

The US FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) has a better ID and fix it page.

The FBI page about DNS Changer (link died 5/2017) is here: http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/november/malware_110911

This is so big in the news because people can’t tell if they have it or not. So, fear of the unknown kicks  in.

So, how do you definitively tell if you have a problem? Go to the FBI site. Since this is a DNS Changer how do you know if you are at the FBI’s site? OK, that is a problem. I’ve spelled out the URL’s to help. The red and green parts have to be in the URL as shown. If what I have does not match what you see in the address field when you get to the page… have a friend email you a copy of the page.

I put this up because some are asking me how to check if they have it. Since they are not finding anything and it keeps coming up in the news, they want a definitive answer with some meat. So, this little post.

Second Life News Update Week 27

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You may have had problems logging in Thursday. Around 1 PM SLT things were getting sorted out. Thursday was to be the main roll out to the main channel. That had to stop because of network outages. I was trying to make it in about that time. No login errors. Viewer would just sit there doing nothing.

Beta Server Meeting

As to exactly what the network problems were no one is saying. That means either they don’t know, some information travels slowly within the Lab, or it was security related.

The roll of the Pre-rendered Library Avatars package was stopped. The Linden regions got the roll. The network outages forced a stop before the roll out could be completed. So, the grid is in a rather unique state this week and will be until next Tuesday. Then the Pre-Render package will go grid wide.

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Content Creation Improvement UG

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The new group had its first meeting. I’m bummed to have missed it, but RL fun was calling. They posted their meeting minutes so I can have an idea of what was happening. Some of the interesting things from the meeting follow.

Geenz Spad is chairing the meeting as the facilitator. He states the purpose of the meeting as: the idea is for people to discuss their ideas in a collaborative environment, and if everyone can agree on an idea, that idea will hopefully be made into a proposal at some point for Linden Lab, and prototypes demonstrating that functionality will also eventually be submitted as well.

So, this meeting is an opportunity for fashion and content designers to contribute ideas to enable better content creation and get problems in the design and creation work flow smoothed out.

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Cloud Party Update

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Vivienne Daguerre has an article up on her blog about Cloud Party starting to rent sky islands. See: Private Islands Available in Cloud Party.

 

She does a good comparison between Second Life® and Cloud Party®. Pushing the numbers into a different format the land-wise cost per square meter is better. SL=US$0.0046/sq meter – CP=US$ 0.0015 that is about 32.5% of the cost in SL. As you get more land in CP the cost goes down to $ 0.0004/sq meter which is about 1/10th the cost.

Tier is another thing. CP has limits on how much stuff you can put in an island. But, I don’t see a tier costing system just limits. The 100×100 meter islands are about 15% of the size of a Second Life region. One can have 350 objects, 25 of which can be dynamic, and that total up to 300,000 triangles.

It is hard to compare that to Second Life. But, 15% of 15,000 prims is 2,250 prims. Trying to turn that into triangles is reaching. Regions can handle 750,000 but I think that is an average… and it is from my memory which is sometimes unreliable. (See SL Limits) But that gives a limit of 112,500 triangles… but it is possible to create a million polygon avatar in SL… so, the polygon comparison numbers seem rather meaningless.

There are no adjacent islands in CP. Also, CP is incomplete. So, it may be reasonable for the land cost to go up as development continues. But for now it is a pretty good deal… provided you don’t compare it to OpenSim, but that gets complex.

#SL News Week 26 & 27

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Lots of things going on RL & SL. So, I keep getting behind on the general news. This should catch us up on some of the interesting things happening.

Content & Mesh Meeting

Cloudy Blurry Avatars

In today’s (7/2) Content & Mesh User Group Nyx Linden brought up the Shining Changes announced last Friday. I covered Shining in Second Life Changes Coming. Nyx’s announcement… or maybe it is better to call it an explanation… follows:

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#SL Viewer Problems

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If you haven’t run into viewer problems, you must be new. A couple of problems have come up recently. Readers have asked or sent me IM’s on them. So, I’ll mention them because they seem to be biting some people. Also, because when I started experimenting I started running into problems.

Second Life Viewer 3.3.3

In most day-to-day use you are not going to run into these problems. But, it is depressing when you do.

Groups

You probably already know large groups, over 5,000, can be a problem and over 10k are a problem. They can be slow to load and nearly, if not completely, impossible to edit and work with.

One of the problems that seems a bit worse is opening a large group can lock up the viewer for over a minute and reportedly in some cases 3 or 4 minutes. I saw my viewer locked up while opening the Phoenix/Firestorm Support group, the largest group of which I’m a member.

See VWR-29124– Severe performance issues on 3.3.2 (258114) Release and 3.3.3 (259197) Beta in “Add scroll list item.” Thanks to Stephan Gaudio for pointing it out.

You’ll notice we currently are past those versions. But, I’ve run into the problem with 3.3.3 (260300) Jun 21 2012.

Baker Linden has been working on the problem for a couple of weeks with some help from other Lindens. But the previous article on Chnages Coming to SL shows there is lots going on. So, I suppose some of of the changes, like fixing groups, are shooting at moving targets.

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