OSgrid’s LBSA Plaza was the crossroads of the hypergrid. (Snapshot by Maria Korolov.)
OSgrid, the oldest grid within the OpenSim metaverse, will shut down at midnight on December 31 after 19 years of operation, the grid’s board introduced in the present day.
The board blamed a malicious actor who used the grid’s personal open code to flood it with huge quantities of randomized knowledge that may’t be deduplicated, in accordance with the announcement.
“This grid wasn’t defeated by time, nor by a scarcity of dedication from the group,” the board stated. “It was systematically damaged by a malicious actor who weaponized our core philosophy in opposition to us.”
I’ve requested the grid admins about who this attacker is, and what residents and different members of the OSgrid ecosystem ought to be doing between now and the tip of the yr to organize for the closing, and what’s going to occur to the cash raised on this yr’s silent public sale. I’ll put up a follow-up article after I hear again.
I’m additionally reaching out to different grid house owners for remark.
If you’re an OSgrid resident, or a volunteer, or a member of the broader OpenSim neighborhood, and have some insights or feedback you’d wish to share, please e mail me at [email protected].
What went mistaken
In response to OSgrid’s announcement, in lower than a yr, the grid’s asset server grew from 5 terabytes to 17 terabytes, and 80 p.c of that’s now junk. The database desk that tracks residents’ stock objects went from 3 gigabytes to 139 gigabytes, turning 10-minute backups into 12-hour ones.
“Our belongings are successfully poisoned,” the board stated.
The one strategy to cease the assaults would have been to lock down the grid and switch it right into a closed, industrial operation, in accordance with the announcement — and not one of the technical employees had been keen to run that form of walled backyard.
Late final month, the day after its annual neighborhood assembly, OSgrid introduced it could begin charging $1 a month for each area past a resident’s first area, which stays free. On the time, the grid stated its internet hosting payments had grown bigger than its annual donation earnings.
These charges would have helped struggle the assaults extra effectively, the board stated in in the present day’s announcement, however solely a everlasting lockdown would have ended them.
In the meantime, volunteers had been spending 11 hours a day, in shifts, blocking assaults and cleansing up knowledge, the board stated.
“We have now survived and combatted many types of assaults over the a long time, however Entropy has lastly received,” the board stated.
The board made the ultimate vote yesterday, and new registrations at the moment are closed, in accordance with the announcement. The grid will maintain a final membership assembly on Sunday, October 18, at 11 a.m. Pacific time at Hurliman Plaza.
Hypergrid handle: hg.osgrid.org:80:Hurliman Plaza
All earlier plans have been canceled, the board stated, together with the grid’s annual fundraiser, which was scheduled to run October 12 via 18. However the silent public sale of donated builds has moved on-line, to the fundraising platform Zeffy, the place successful bidders get a obtain hyperlink to an IAR — stock archive — file of their merchandise.
Nineteen years of free land
OSgrid launched in 2007 and is a nonprofit run solely by unpaid volunteers, and it lets anybody join their very own areas to the grid without cost, as we’ve beforehand reported. It has additionally served as a testing floor for OpenSim improvement, and its LBSA Plaza has lengthy been the crossroads of the hypergrid.
The grid has 153,000 registered customers, in accordance with the announcement.
The previous two years have been tough. In 2025, OSgrid wiped its stock database to filter practically 20 years of getting older and corrupted knowledge, and was down for greater than a month. This spring, it went down once more for a few month, blaming metadata dimension limits on the filesystem for its belongings.
It additionally survived an outage of a number of months in 2014 and 2015, throughout which a major variety of belongings had been misplaced, in accordance with our earlier protection.
Maria Korolov
Hypergrid Enterprise editor and writer Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist. Through the day, Maria Korolov is an award-winning freelance know-how journalist who covers synthetic intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise digital actuality. See her Amazon creator web page right here and comply with her on Twitter, Fb, or LinkedIn, and take a look at her newest movies on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Electronic mail her at [email protected]. Her first digital world novella, Krim Occasions, made the Amazon best-seller listing in its class. Her second novella, The Misplaced King of Krim, is out now. She can be the writer of MetaStellar, a brand new on-line journal of speculative fiction.
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