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2007-10-23 17:49:28.916168+00 by ebradway 7 comments

In case you aren't a baseball fan, the Colorado Rockies and the Boston Red Sox are advancing to the World Series. The first game is tomorrow night. Tickets for Coors Field in Denver went on sale yesterday - only online. Within minutes the servers succumbed to "an external, malicious attack" causing "a system-wide outage" for ticket vendor, Paciolan. Only 500 tickets were sold.

Today, starting at noon (about 30 minutes ago), they brought the system back online but, evidently, with some serious traffic control rather than beefing up the servers to handle the load... The system claims "Do not refresh this page or you will be dropped to the end of the line." I call hoax... Are they actually tracking MAC addresses or cookies to manage the queue? Or are they playing on folks' tech ignorance and fears of not getting tickets to avoid another "malicious attack"?

[ related topics: Games Law Beer Sports Macintosh ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2007-10-23 17:52:05.833436+00 by: ebradway

I just glanced at the page source for the "buy tickets" button and it only opens the "please wait" window.... Hmmm...

#Comment Re: made: 2007-10-23 17:59:29.281104+00 by: ebradway

Oh yeah... notice the copyright at the bottom of the "please wait" page? (c) 2001-107? The code uses the javascript 'year', which is number of years since 1900.

#Comment Re: made: 2007-10-23 18:00:19.667659+00 by: ebradway [edit history]

And this is the link that the "please wait" page sends you to (keep clicking here to get tickets)

If you get the "Please wait" page, just click back and hit the link again...

#Comment Re: made: 2007-10-23 18:04:00.00705+00 by: ebradway

And a quick scan of Paciolan's job opennings tells me that they are using IBM WebSphere on Linux - probably on IBM hardware. I bet Sun's going to be pissed...

#Comment Re: made: 2007-10-23 18:25:11.6547+00 by: ebradway

The event is mentioned in WindowsITPro...

And over at KKTV, no one seems to actually have gotten tickets (and keep getting sent to the end of the line).

#Comment Re: made: 2007-10-23 19:28:08.641272+00 by: ebradway [edit history]

Or maybe, try here.

#Comment Re: made: 2007-10-24 02:28:04.753211+00 by: whump

If they want to call 1,000's of Rockies fans trying to buy tickets "malicious," go right ahead. This American League fan won't disagree.