After investigating the cause of why our site was operating slowly we have found that the result was a Python script that accessed our site from the same IP address over 12 million times in the past week. We have blocked that IP address and the Python module used.
Aug 28, 2025 05:18Our site is not able to handle that kind of load.
After identifying who it was it became clear that the repeated accesses were the result of a misconfigured script and were not meant to be malicious. As part of this process we have made changes to our site's security at Cloudflare.
At times you may see a CAPTCHA on our site that you must solve to proceed. (sometimes it is automatic) In some cases, you may be temporarily blocked if you are using our site too frequently.
We don't know how the security upgrades might impact the ability to view data from a Google Earth network link. (That is used to access data from our site within a file you previously downloaded from our site that allows you to view model and recon data.)
During times our site is under significant load, some of our site's systems will fail. During earlier mitigation attempts using tools at Cloudflare our site's systems failed when the highest security level was used.
This is our final update on this issue.
If you see significant disruption in connecting to our site, please contact us through Bluesky. As previously mentioned in our last post, certain content has been temporarily removed from our site. Some data will be made available again within a day or so and some should return next year.
