This is so funny. Here's what the terraserver people are saying about their system being overloaded: "The site is being hammered (by people trying to log on), and hackers are attacking it." I highly doubt hackers are attacking it. More likely is the fact that slashdot (and almost every other site) had links to it. For those that don't know, slashdot is a major technology news site with a huge number of readers, and in web parlance, "getting slashdotted" is what happens to your server if slashdot carries a story about you: most likely your server goes down under the flood of traffic. (This can be costly to site administrators.) Definitly Terraserver was slashdotted. Basically there is no way to tell the difference between a Denial of Service attack and the slashdot effect, so embarassed administrators often blame the problem on hackers when it probably has more to do with their configuration. (Just for the record, I'm pretty confident this site - the database at least - would be crushed by even a modest level of traffic. Good thing that's not a problem.)
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- jim 4-19-2000 1:54 pm