Cudos for the work you and others continue to put into the site.

For anyone who may think that passing around that extra data is nothing (well, unless you are connecting over dial-up), I can give you an example where it did make (or would have made) a difference.

Back in early December of this past year (2003), I spent a week out-of-town to apartment hunt prior to moving (at the end of that month). The hotel I stayed at had broadband access, and I had my laptop, so I thought, "no problem." On three consecutive nights, I got disconnected when I made a change to my scratchpad (I didn't make the association the first night, though). After several calls to the technical support group for the access, I found out that I had accidentally triggered (because of the combined size of my homenode and scratchpad at the time) their implementation of Snort, which was configured to watch for (among other things) attempts to exploit an overflow in CGIs by sending large chunks of data (Snort rule: WEB-ATTACKS /usr/bin/perl execution attempt, although I don't know if they had modified it or anything). While I wasn't affected by the issue after I found out the root cause (on the last evening before returning home), it did prove annoying, and could also prove to be an issue for other monks, in other situations.

In reply to Re^3: New scratchpads by atcroft
in thread New scratchpads by castaway

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