Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Kelly
Yes, sorry, it was the Royal Signals museum or whatever . Used to be terribly awkward , you asked for a manual download and they got back to you when they felt like it.
|
Still terribly awkward, I'm afraid (and for the same reason: our little "friend" the manual pirate and his/their helpers, plus the Chinese).
Alister Mitchell (who did a lot of the scanning and PDF production) is no longer with us. I have a full time job and scan what I can, when I can, but run Macs which are not suited to the production process, so Keith gets to do most of the cleanup and PDF production. We've also had endless fun & games involving the "Canadian Pharmacy" spammers using GoDaddy for redirection that leads to the site getting blocked by Google (and the email forwarding blocked by Spamcop), both of which were outside our control.
The somewhat Byzantine rules were there to stop the piracy attempts, and evolved over time (You used to be able to download documents and then request the passwords - until some sites in China took to downloading the entire archive every week and cost us a fortune (relatively) in excess bandwidth charges, likewise our little chum "Franz the Schwanze" and friends with his Russian PDF password cracking tool (Pirated! As he was too cheap to buy an official "legitimate" copy, as we discovered when we upgraded to AES encryption with random passwords and spotted him asking if anyone had a "hacked" copy of the password cracking tool they could send him.)
I've spent a lot of time, effort, and actual money on the manual archive, as have other people. It's a free service because when the WW2 kit was being sold off as surplus the documentation was still classified and a lot of stuff that should have been preserved (or used as-is) was stripped for "useful" parts and the rest discarded. We had the opportunity to do something about it, it was an interesting project, so we did it. We're careful about not including other people's work in the archive - and it's surprising (not to mention depressing) how much stuff we get "offered" with various different copyright notices embedded in it.)
Anyway, rant over. It's there if you need it and don't mind a bit of "hoop jumping"; right now I'm going to open a beer and put my feet up for a bit.
Chris.