Contentious Second Life update next week
Linden Lab have announced a server-side update to the Second Life grid that will take place across two days, specifically Tuesday 27 November, and Wednesday 28 November. The first day will see a core services update, followed by a rolling-restart of the grid simulators the next day.
The upgrade is to support an upcoming feature in viewer 1.18.6 - and that's where things get a bit ... sticky.
The new feature is a change to the way logins are handled - this change was first announced on 28 September. The change to the way viewer authentication was to be handled raised some eyebrows among resident developers, and Linden Lab publicly demurred saying that their changes "weren't set in stone" and that the scheme was only in the early planning stages.
Linden Lab invited feedback on the plan, and they got it. Resident developers noted that while the scheme appeared to be unable to achieve the Linden Lab's stated objectives, increased security risks for Second Life users and made things more difficult and potentially more time-consuming. We were unable to find any evidence of support for the scheme as written from resident-developers, though they were eager to help Linden Lab find alternatives that would satisfy their stated objectives without suffering from the noted severe issues.
A long period of silence followed on the topic.
Now, eight weeks later, the code apparently is rolling out - seemingly the plan was set in stone - or so we have to assume until we hear how the feedback that was specifically requested was incorporated into the subsystem.
In response to the announcement resident developer Matthew Dowd said "[d]iscussions here conclusively demonstrated [this was] totally flawed in realising any of objectives [Linden Lab] wanted to achieve but opened up a whole new set of security and technical issues."
