Burning Man says hackers cut line for coveted tickets
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Burning-Man-says-hackers-cut-line-for-coveted-6097357.php
Starting at noon Wednesday, 80,000 people crowded Burning Man’s servers to try to get tickets to the event. But only the first 20,000 that clicked — a flurry that lasted mere milliseconds — were guaranteed a pair of tickets in the digital first-come, first-served crapshoot. As usual, that bummed out the majority of those vying to get into the desert bacchanal....
The day after all 40,000 available tickets were claimed, Burning Man organizers announced that “approximately 200 people created a technical 'backdoor’ to the sale and made their way to the front of the line. Absolutely no tickets were sold before the sale opened at 12:00 p.m., but they were able to purchase the first batch of tickets when the sale started.”
The purported hack underscored the ballooning popularity of the annual art free-for-all, which draws tens of thousands of costumed revelers, known in the community as “burners,” to a remote dry lake bed in the Black Rock Desert called the playa....
In a growing dynamic, Burning Man is a prime destination for many in the Bay Area’s tech community. Amid the nearly 70,000 antiestablishment, pagan partyers are Silicon Valley royalty — and many of their programmer underlings. San Francisco’s bars and cafes, which are usually lined with rows of young people tapping away on laptops, are conspicuously empty during the one-week festival.
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