Life In 19x19

Perhaps there is a hardware error.

I had a test server (and will have one again eventually), but no, the bug has never appeared there. Not enough load I suspect.

And yes, open sourcing the code, somebody might spot the bug. I have never denied that there are some advantages to open sourcing KGS; although I still believe that for me, I prefer to keep it closed.

My ideas :
- malicious denial of service attack with deliberately wrong communication packets
- rogue KGS client with reverse engineered protocol engine ( more likely )

Sounds like something in the communication you assume never to happen happens
( length information incorrect or something...)

Well, it maybe something completley different.
I keep my fingers crossed...

rogue KGS client with reverse engineered protocol engine

I don't think there are many of those. specially after some recent updates.

I had one that I sometimes used to watch really busy games (like tournament demo's) (It had some very useful features for that.)
But It does not work anymore because of some relatively recent updates.
It just tells me the client is "extremely out of date" and fails to connect.

I did not create it myself, so I have no knowledge about how it worked.

I haven't been on KGS much lately. I haven't had noticed any sudden disconnects due to KGS going down.

Clients really shouldn't be able to crash servers. Given how infrequently the error occurs, it seems rather unlikely to me. Besides, this "certain anonymous client" we all know about has been around for a long time, but doesn't even work currently on KGS (at least the version that's available publicly doesn't).

Also, if I understand it correctly, the author sent a version of it to wms.