Travelers planning to go home during the Lunar New Year holidays had trouble booking a high speed rail ticket online yesterday morning, as hackers tried to prevent buyers from logging onto the system.
The online ticketing system of the Taiwan High Speed Rail Co(THSRC) was activated at 12am yesterday for those scheduled to travel between Feb. 1 and Feb. 12.
The Lunar New Year holidays begin on Feb. 6, or Lunar New Year's Eve, and ends on Feb. 11.
PHOTO: LO PEI-DER, TAIPEI TIMES
However, interested buyers said they could not access the rail company's Web site.
THSRC spokesperson Ted Chia (賈先德) said yesterday that the firm's technical specialists later identified the problem as hackers attempting to block other requests, as some of the requests were sent simultaneously from the same Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.
"By sending multiple requests at a time, they [hackers] succeeded in barring others from making reservations online," he said. "But by blocking these IP addresses, our system was able to resume operation at 2am."
Chia said that as of 6am yesterday, a total of 60,977 tickets had been sold online. Passengers can pick up the tickets on the day they are scheduled to leave.
Some frustrated buyers who could not log onto the system during the night were forced to go to the high speed rail station early yesterday morning to buy pre-sale tickets.
A passenger told a television news reporter that he had been trying to log onto the system since 11:50pm on Friday.
"I kept trying until 2am, but it [the system] kept saying the server was busy," he said.
As of 5pm, a total of 140,671 tickets had been sold, including 122,091 sold online. Many trains still have empty seats.
Chia said that many passengers logged onto the system early because they wanted to purchase tickets for some of the more popular time slots, such as the evening of Feb. 5.
He suggested that passengers try different ticket-booking techniques. For example, if they could not buy tickets all the way from Taipei to Kaohsiung, they could try purchasing a ticket from Taipei to Chiayi first and another ticket from Chiayi to Kaohsiung, he said.
Chia also said the company plans to launch a voice-booking system this year, but declined to specify when it would start.
Meanwhile, the Taiwan Railway Administration had announced earlier that the public can start booking tickets for Lunar New Year holidays on Jan. 19.
A magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck off the coast of Hualien County in eastern Taiwan at 7pm yesterday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The epicenter of the temblor was at sea, about 69.9km south of Hualien County Hall, at a depth of 30.9km, it said. There were no immediate reports of damage resulting from the quake. The earthquake’s intensity, which gauges the actual effect of a temblor, was highest in Taitung County’s Changbin Township (長濱), where it measured 5 on Taiwan’s seven-tier intensity scale. The quake also measured an intensity of 4 in Hualien, Nantou, Chiayi, Yunlin, Changhua and Miaoli counties, as well as
Taiwan is to have nine extended holidays next year, led by a nine-day Lunar New Year break, the Cabinet announced yesterday. The nine-day Lunar New Year holiday next year matches the length of this year’s holiday, which featured six extended holidays. The increase in extended holidays is due to the Act on the Implementation of Commemorative and Festival Holidays (紀念日及節日實施條例), which was passed early last month with support from the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party. Under the new act, the day before Lunar New Year’s Eve is also a national holiday, and Labor Day would no longer be limited
COMMITMENTS: The company had a relatively low renewable ratio at 56 percent and did not have any goal to achieve 100 percent renewable energy, the report said Pegatron Corp ranked the lowest among five major final assembly suppliers in progressing toward Apple Inc’s commitment to be 100 percent carbon neutral by 2030, a Greenpeace East Asia report said yesterday. While Apple has set the goal of using 100 percent renewable energy across its entire business, supply chain and product lifecycle by 2030, carbon emissions from electronics manufacturing are rising globally due to increased energy consumption, it said. Given that carbon emissions from its supply chain accounted for more than half of its total emissions last year, Greenpeace East Asia evaluated the green transition performance of Apple’s five largest final
The first tropical storm of the year in the western North Pacific, Wutip (蝴蝶), has formed over the South China Sea and is expected to move toward Hainan Island off southern China, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said today. The agency said a tropical depression over waters near the Paracel and Zhongsha islands strengthened into a tropical storm this morning. The storm had maximum sustained winds near its center of 64.8kph, with peak gusts reaching 90kph, it said. Winds at Beaufort scale level 7 — ranging from 50kph to 61.5kph — extended up to 80km from the center, it added. Forecaster Kuan Hsin-ping
RSS