07/09/2013, Dear IVAO users, As you all may know we recently undergone a large DDoS attack. Although they are a bad thing and we hope they will never happen again these situations usually show some vulnerabilities of the systems. Some of those we can fix without users even know it, a firewall setting for example, others do involve users, like the Whazzup File. We believe that the fact that the Whazzup file is open and reachable for the whole internet played a part in the DDoS attack we encountered and to be able to have a continuous service of the IVAO network we have to do something about this. The solution is simple, instead of just let everybody access the Whazzup file we create an API that takes care of access. This of course has a lot of consequences for all that are using it at the moment. I will promise right away that we will try to have the transition as smooth as possible and will give everybody the chance to implement the new API before the old one gets closed down. The general outline of the plan is: We create the API and release with it the API Access Request Form For several weeks both the API and the Whazzup will be supported The old Whazzup file will be removed and not accessible anymore We have no exact dates yet, but will update this post once we have more information about this. The reason for this is that we created this press release as soon as we came to the conclusion this was needed to give you all a as soon as possible heads up to the upcoming changes. For those who start worry about implementing a changed API, don’t worry that much, u used to retreive the API file by going to link.to/whazzup.txt, you still can retreive the same file that contains the same data, but now the link will look like link.to/whazzup?api=YOUR-API-KEY. We also use this opportunity to implement some extra possibilities in the API, of which one is the possibility to not receive the Whazzup file, but the same data in a JSON array, which is much easier to use for developers in many development languages. To be clear, you can download it in BOTH ways, the old whazzup data structure will not be removed! This is an addition with which we try to help developers. A second thing is that we will compress the data, this means less bandwidth and load on our network will be used by our Whazzup API. This means that you script needs to uncompress the data before using it, but this can easily be done, i.e. in PHP this will do the trick:
Posted on: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 10:01:13 +0000
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