the page works for me and im on a vpn right now

url works for me march 30, 11am grid time. Sure one has to wait 3 mins or so until that security check passed. .. @ChanGridJP: Do you use a VPN or so that this checker recognize as bad access? Then it just does its job

Apparently the article has disappeared because when I clicked on the link it came back as " backend failed to fetch " whatever that means.

Fascinating, interesting reading, who'd have thought OpenSim grids and and their owners would become targets in cyberwarfare! Thanks for highlighting this article Ellen!

My personal opinion: Sam Adama / Touche / Capricia Cylon / Capricia Online Worlds / capricia.xyz /... is a one man show.

It seems to be the time to cut the russian internet.

I hope these sad wierdos realize that by DDOSIng HGB they are doing nothing but helping the cause and that they won't achieve anything but even more unity. These people are beyond sad.

They 've been sending these 'warnings' to everyone, even to us. Harmless barking idiots

It may seem like Maria doesn't know who is behind that e-mail address. After all, she is rarely in-world, she probably doesn't have an eye on OSW either, and Hypergrid Business absolutely relies on information being sent to them to have something to write about.

But I think she knows exactly where the mail comes from. She may never have heard of Touché whose DJ acts have never been advertised on HGB. But she knows the domain. She knows what company is behind it. She knows what the company does, namely host OpenSim grids. I guess she also knows about at least one of these grids which one it is. And this particular grid is known to HGB pretty well: Caprica.

You may remember that HGB had an article on Caprica being staunchly on Putin's side. Yes, they did have one. Yes, it's gone. It's gone for the same reason the article linked above does not mention Caprica or whom the e-mail address belongs to.

HGB got a "gag order" from Caprica. I'm not even kidding. https://caprica.xyz/in-response-to-a-question-from-a-corre...

Maria also says, quote, "I don’t think that Russia’s state-sponsored cyber warfare teams would care much about OpenSim." End of quote. Shortly after the article came out, HGB went down. Literal hours within, "Haha, they ain't gonna do shit anyway." We don't know who exactly took HGB down, but I refuse to believe that this was a coincidence. Also, HGB is now suddenly protected by Cloudflare.

If the words from the mail are true, then the entire OpenSim ecosystem has been ratted out to Russian cyber-warfare units of whichever kind. Not only Hypergrid Business, but also OpenSimWorld (which was explicitly mentioned by name in the mail), both are said to be listed, quote, "for destruction", and very likely also the grids themselves.

Now, for OpenSim itself, keep three things in mind.

One, OpenSim is open-source. Its workings can easily be figured out from its source code. As can be potential vulnerabilites and attack vectors.

Two, OpenSim is still a flawed beta with a very slow development cycle that can't even react quickly upon nasty bugs because everything has to go through the hands of one single spare-time volunteer. There are no small bugfix/security patch releases. Even if there were, many grids would never apply them because they're running an OpenSim version that's outdated now already for whatever reason.

Three, not all grids are run by professionals who know how to secure them water-tightly (if that's possible). By far most grids are run by amateurs who neither know nor care about server security. The popularity of OpenSim grid server software in the shape of pre-configured, ready-to-run, anyone-can-run-this Windows point-and-click applications says a lot.

Four, destroying OpenSim won't have any consequences. If even tech geeks have never heard of it, much less the general public which has even forgotten Second Life, how should national authorities? Why should they care that something is gone which they didn't even know existed in the first place? So destroying OpenSim would be safe. It isn't like whoever did that would face devastating retaliation.

And five, there is a WHOLE LOT of anti-war activism going on in OpenSim. The Ukrainian flag all over the place in-world (which is now a "Nazi flag"). Avatars dressing in blue and yellow (again, "Nazi flag"). OSW's title bar in blue and yellow (in case you've forgotten, a "Nazi flag"). Even entire in-world events in support of Ukraine and peace.

Points one through four mean it's easy to attack OpenSim. Point five is the very reason for possible attacks against OpenSim.

If you ask me whether the war will come into OpenSim, I'd have to say it probably already has. And the goal is the complete and irrevocable destruction of everything and anything that sides with Ukraine.