Power outage takes out major sites
Filed Under Internet, News, SF Bay Area, Second Life |
A series of power outages in San Francisco has taken a couple of pretty large sites out of commission. Those affected include:
craigslist
some SecondLife servers
NetFlix
LiveJournal, Vox, TypePad (and the rest of SixApart)
Yelp
Technorati
AdBrite
Some CurrentTV servers
Some ZDNet blogs
and the NSFW kink.com is also down…
All of these sites are hosted by 365 Main and I’m sure there are several other sites that are down because of this. Don’t these people have reliable backup generators? sheesh.. where am I going to get my Internet fix from today? The best part is this press release went up shortly before the sites started going down.
SecondLife is also experiencing trouble due to the power outages and has disabled logins until it is back up fully.
And for us locals, it looks like the afternoon commute might be a bit crazy if this isn’t resolved soon.
- Laughing Squid reports as well.
- ValleyWag has an interesting “drunk employee” rumor on 365 Main.
- SixApart’s Twitter has up to the minute updates.
- O’Reilly Radar has reports as well
- ValleyWag says customers are lining up at the entrance to 365 Main
UPDATE from SFGate:
At least 30,000 Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers in San Francisco and the northern Peninsula lost power this afternoon after an explosion under a manhole cover on Mission Street, the utility said.
…
Witnesses said they heard an explosion at about 1:50 p.m., then saw flames coming from the manhole.
Actor Torino Von Jones, 32, said he was filming a Fruit of the Loom commercial down the block at the time.
“We were standing over there waiting for the camera cue when we heard a big explosion,” he said. “Flames came up taller than I am, and I’m 6-foot-2.”
“Naturally, when you hear an explosion, you think the worst,” said Von Jones, who nevertheless hurried back to work. “We’re Fruit of the Loom — we’ve got to make this commercial.”
Avatar Machine
Filed Under Art, Interesting, Second Life |
So you spend a lot of time in World of Warcraft or maybe Second Life and you’re not so used to tromping out into the real world due to the shift in perspective? The Avatar Machine can help you out with that. Built by design student Mark Owens, the Avatar Machine is “a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface.” In short, it’s a camera on poles wired to a video monitor in a headset that allows you to see the physical world in the same manner that you would in say World of Warcraft, from the 3rd person. In addition, it’s a “costume” that makes you look even more like a virtual avatar. I can imagine it would be slightly disorienting at first, but then strangely comfortable to most of us.
Open Source Second Life
Filed Under Internet, Second Life |
Wow, Linden Labs is open sourcing the server code for Second Life so anyone can run the sim. Granted not many of us have the power to run this, but a company like Google or IBM could. But this means that one company won’t necessarily have control of the Second Life grid. I haven’t had time lately to log into Second Life and check it out, but I continue to think that it has great potential. (Just because I don’t own a TV, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a huge impact on society) As a fan of the vision of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, I would love to see this whole thing succeed. I think this is a great step in that direction.
via zdnet blogs
Second Life attacked (again)
Filed Under Second Life |
I’ve been on the road for the last week, moving to San Francisco, and haven’t had a chance to jump on Second Life. That’s not such a bad thing as I might not have been able to log in yesterday even if I had the chance. The griefers are back at it, trying to ruin everyone’s experience in Linden Land. A rogue programmer decided that Second Life needed to be a bit more Sonic the Hedgehogy and people started seeing familiar spinning gold rings appearing and replicating throughout the world. The worm quickly spread and Linden Labs shut off all logins for a brief period of time while they tried to clean up the servers.
You can’t help but start to think of Snow Crash when you hear things like this. Let’s hope that this provides even more motivation for necessary security measures to limit the impact of these attacks. With educational insititutions and large businesses making their way into SL, there will be more users, more traffic, more griefers, and a much greater need for some sort of control as far as the technical side of things.
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