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

[Stefan Magdalinski]

Sean Phelan wrote:

> 

> 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.


it worked on me ;)


> 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 :-)


so when is this going live? 

me want me want ME WANT.


-- 

/**

Stefan Magdalinski                             m 0370 67 70 58

stefanisness [dot] org

                              h 0171 580 0831 

it's isness as usual...                                    **/