How DO they do that?

[HalLoomy]

If there are 30-60 thousand "Residents" in SL at any given time, how does LL manage to "monitor" each one every ten minutes or so?

What data are they gathering and for what purpose?

Hal.

[Alwin Alcott]

they monitor everything... your place, time, money, who is near you, who you talk to, and what you type, what you buy, what you spend, who you pay .... and so on.. and so on

 

They have "things" who do that for them.. it's software, running on servers...

[Alwin Alcott]

i know...but it is true... as soon there is need for the info, they have it, for example, fraud, abuse...and even some is used for account verification when you need real specialistic support.

[Rolig Loon]

You could get truly paranoid about it if you wanted to, I guess. The fact is, though, that the only way Second Life can work at all is to have your viewer and the Linden Lab servers in constant communication, trading information back and forth.  Every second is divided into 45 frames.  During each one, the servers need to know precisely where your avatar is, how fast it is moving, what is it saying and listening to, what it has in inventory, and dozens of other bits of information.  The servers double check with your viewer to see what may have changed since the previous frame.  If they get out out sync by more than a very small amount, you start to experience lag.  Much more, and you crash.

This is why you feel the greatest lag in a crowded region. The servers spend more time keeping track of avatars than anything else they do.  It's also the biggest diference between SL and almost all computer games you may have played on line.  Most games sit entirely on your own computer, using prepackaged routines that handle your character locally.  They don't need a bank of hundreds of remote servers, and they don't let you make unpredictable changes to your character and its surroundings.

For a brief summary of server architecture, see http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Server_architecture

[Rhonda Huntress]

I am curious where you got the data from.  "each one ever 10 minutes or so" is not the way it is usually done.

For starters, they use computers to monitor for them.  Kind of handy since they have so many.

Everything that could possibly be subpoenaed is logged.  Every chat, every transfer, every payment, etc.  They also log performance statistics.  Time dilatation, scripts running, network latency, etc.  The simplest "analytics" is the good ol' 80|20 rule.  80% of the problems will come from 20% of the sims.  Find what's common among those 20% and fix it.

Obviously that is just a quick look.  Data analytics is a hot thing and there are much more robust and reliable ways to improve overall grid performance.  It is also in Second Life's best interest to keep a strong economy.  Finding what, why and how people spend money is going to be high on the analytics' agenda.

And they also like to spy on individuals to see if there is any hankey pankey going on.  You probably have an invisible Linden watching you dress right now.

 

>>@ Loon @ Rhonda- Fascinating stuff, dears. Does any of this manic obsession with data impact on my experience, in terms of performance at this end?
Nope.  Your performance will be based on the slowest point between your PC and the server.  Take a chat log, for example.  It is already being passed to multiple people depending on who is in range.  The local disk is always in range.  It will have its copy stored before the sim even decides if it needs to send you a copy.  All this data is being gathered, sorted and sent out anyway. It costs virtually nothing in terms of CPU cycles to save logs.

 

 

[Rolig Loon]

Of course. If Linden Lab didn't maintain the constant two-way flow of data, everything would stop dead. After all, that flow of data is what makes SL work. When you experience lag or bake fail, or when you can't get things to rez, or when you can't teleport or get a corrupted inventory cache, the data flow has been interrupted or is out of sync.

[Syo Emerald]

Where do you pull the idea from, that monitoring happens "every ten minutes or so"? That would be totally derail the purpose of it. Beside this weird idea, the actual monitoring on what happens inworld is different then what you imagine it to be like. There is no legion of employees sitting infront of monitors watching what everyone of those 30-60 thousand users are doing...there is probably not even one person doing that the hole time.

If they store any type of data from inworld, it might be chatlogs, because all chat passes the server and can be easily stored. Beside that, they probably only store the information you provided in terms of billing and other informations from your account.

[KarenMichelle Lane]

Loomy,

As a former operator of 9 regions on the OSGrid you need to understand that absolutely everything you do and experience in Second Life and on the SL Grid is Transaction Oriented. From the simplest Movement to each IM that you send. All these transactions are logged and processed by some server responsible for presenting you with the outcome of your request. This includes all $Linden activity as well.

Now the question about if anyone is actually looking at what you are doing is just an exercise in common sense.

1) Everyone on the region with you and looking in your general direction gets to see what you are doing. So in that sense, you are being watched all the time.

2) Are there huge control rooms where the activity of all online accounts can be watched like you see in the movies is just plain nonsense. Yes a Linden Lab employee can drop in and see the activity on any particular region if they want to either in Full Monitor Only [Ghost or God] Mode or as an active Avatar in the scene.

3) As to your question, the many servers that allow the Grid to exist monitor you 27/7.

4) The logs are available to LL employees as needed. These are usually consulted to review reported A.R.s [Abuse Reports] and remember, everything you say is being captured unless you use a Viewer that supports end to end encryption.

Does that answer your question?

Are you any more or less paranoid now?