UKNM: Hackers? (was: Thanks for a great response...)

[Sean Phelan]

At 9:35 am +0100 14/10/98, Tim Hayward wrote:

>

>Over the last few days the TV ads have been driving the hit rate up and

>there have been some server problems (Microsoft blame this on 'Hackers',

>I'd value a second opinion!) but these are being ironed out as we speak.


Hm....  I may regret writing this in a semi-public forum, but I suspect

that hackers are a bit of an urban legend. Like alien abduction or crop

circles, a few fairly questionable incidents created a media frenzy, a lot

of copying and a semi-legitimate excuse for, er, problems that had a much

more mundane cause.


We get a large number of weird requests to the Multi Media Mapping servers,

usually from academics, students and the more techie HTML developers who

are trying to work out how our map server works, whether they can get

great big maps, world maps or other cute stuff from us.


In the early days they would cause a server restart or poor performance

every now and then, but we regarded that as part of the extended public

beta test.  For a while, when anybody tried anything outrageous we would

send a screen that said "Congratulations!! yes, you are a very clever

techie, and you have worked out how it all works.".  This seemed to make

them happy, and they stopped playing.


Now we have a full Ordnance Survey licence to generate maps right down

to every street corner in the UK, we have to be more careful and we don't

even let people know when they have got it right.  They just get really,

surprisingly slow response times :-)


But we never have anything malicious. And almost never anything from

outside the academic or developer community.


Now, are we just lucky, or am I being nieve?  Or are there really as

many real hackers as there are alien visitors in Shropshire?


Cheers

Sean


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Sean Phelan

seanmultimap [dot] com

     http://www.multimap.com

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