WebMaster, Incorporated contacted me regarding my statements about their ConferenceRoom product. My intenet in writing the statement was simply to indicate that my prank was made possible by the failure of the CNN system, not by any "hacking" I had done. I did not intend to attack WebMaster's product and apologize if anyone interepreted it as such. Below is their letter to me and my response.

David Schwartz wrote:
> 
>         Let me begin by introducing myself. I'm David Schwartz, the Director of
> Software Development for WebMaster, Incorporated. I'd like to take the
> oppurtunity to correct one inaccurate portion of your statement.
> 
>         You state:
> 
>         "CNN chose to use WebMaster's ConferenceRoom product
> (http://www.webmaster.com/) on a Windows platform. The instability of this
> software led to several problems during the session."
> 
>         Actually, what happened is that CNN was lulled into a false sense of
> security by more than 70 days of operation without a problem since they
> connected that machine to their network. When the userload and traffic
> increased, the CPU (a P2-233) was maxed out for brief periods of time,
> causing more data than usual to be buffered in memory. Unfortunately, the
> machine only had 128Mb of RAM. This is what caused the instability, not the
> software. ConferenceRoom can actually handle 10,000 users on Windows NT with
> adequate memory.
> 
>         DS

I would consider excessive hardware requirements to be a sign of poor
software design.  I can handle far more than 1500 users on a P2-233 with
128MB of RAM using almost any of the freely available IRC servers on a
FreeBSD platform.  Nonetheless, I agree that, given their choice of software
and operating system, CNN failed to host the system on a machine with
sufficient resources.

However, no piece of software should respond to load it cannot handle
by simply crashing.  The fact that the software crashed rather than simply
slowing down or gracefully limiting additional users is certainly evidence
of "instability" and the crashes are what allowed me to use the nick of
President_Clinton. Because of that, I do not feel that my statement was
incorrect.  However, I will modify the statement to indicate that these are
based on my evaluation of the incident, and provide a link to your objection
and my response.

If this is not acceptable or you feel further modifications to my statement
are necessary to prevent harm to your company, please do not hesitate to
contact me again.

Christopher Petro