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Information Valuation - The Most Buck for the Bits?
Rational asks: "I've heard of Everquest accounts sold for upwards of a thousand dollars... Considering that what is actually for sale is just an username and password, which generally comes up to less than 20 bytes in total, this amounts to over $50 per byte. What are the most expensive pieces of information that you have heard of, in dollars per byte? Perhaps satellite pictures? The Human genome?"
Judging from the number of time's I've been suckered into looking at it, and that someone somewhere is paying for each of those views, I'll bet that the aggregate cost for Goat Sex is in the trillions.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
People with credit card limits in excess of several million dollars, their number sequence and expiration date can be stored in just a few bytes (8 bytes at the most).
<Amanda`> I just went out to the parking lot in my bathrobe to exchange warez CDs.
The problem with your comment is in the assumption that the only thing being sold is a username and password. Obviously the buyer thought they were buying something a little more substantive.
I had to pay $4G for changing only 4 bytes of my bank account state, that's $1G/B!
Krótko: kady Erotomek
W pimiennictwie ma swój domek.
Subject says it all really. What was it in the end, $5 million, $10 million?
Imagine the price for byte of an eight-character password that lets you change your grades, retroactively, to all 'A's. Satellite pictures and Human genome are lots of bytes.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
But I bet I would kill to get my hands on a real official version of a playable DOOM III demo.
Karmack ?! Why are you wasting your time reading my post ???!!!
Rapid Nirvana
So are we talking about data, or short-form representations of it?
I am willing to sell this fine, low UID slashdot account for only $10000 (or about $500 per byte stored on the server). If that isn't a bargain, I don't know what is :-)
I posted this little nugget about an expensive DB access. Probably not tops but up there.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
Considering that what is actually for sale is just an username and password, which generally comes up to less than 20 bytes in total, this amounts to over $50 per byte
Of course that's not what is for sale. What is sold is the information stored on the EQ servers that defines the character. The username/password are just what let you get at the character data. When I bought my house the transaction resulted in a key, but I can assure you that's not what I paid more than half a million dollars for...
This doesn't negate the basic point though. I don't know how much space an EQ character takes up, but it will still probably result in a fairly impressive dollar/byte sum.
Sailing over the event horizon
The name of GWBs coke dealer from the 70's [or whenever he did it]. I bet he would pay a lot of money to suppress that info.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Comment from Stewart Brand, the guy the "Information wants to be free" quote is attributed to: On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
You aren't paying for bytes, you are paying for time. The time the person selling took to build their character up, for instance. The end product is represented by a series of bytes, and that is what is physically transferred from person to person, but the actual product is not the username/password.
In every other case it's the same. The human genome represents millions of dollars in hardware, research, man hours, etc. Sure, you can fit the resulting data into a nice little package of X bytes, but you aren't paying for the bytes.
-Adam
You are neither well-formed, nor valid.
It would have to be license keys. Probably involving SGI.
A license key is a string of maybe 30 bytes usually, and cost up to the millions of dollars.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Maybe a better question is how much money has been spent to protect the smallest amount of information? Nuclear launch codes come to mind.
Or to decrypt the smallest amount of information : Enigma.
Or another question is, if someone were able to misuse some numbers, what would be the most damage they could cause? For me, I think it would be my social security number. 9 Digits. They could run up massive debt in my name. Granted, there's legal protection, but still - losing your government-issued identity is probably the worst thing that could happen to an individual, from the standpoint of protecting a small number of bits.
The most expensive number to ever calculate was of course, 42.
Education is the silver bullet.
The issue illustrated by the EQ example is not that the user/pass combination is $x/y bits. As many have pointed out, the actual data you gain access to is much more than the bits in the user/pass, *however* the real issue is - what the most valuable data you've ever seen, protected by the least amount of entropy?
My money would be on nuclear launch codes, although I have no idea how long they are, so I could be wrong, but holding life or death for billions in a string of numbers is pretty impressive.
"We win" -- VE Day, 5/8/1945
Calculate the cost of that.
--Blair
"Hint: don't just count $."
Natalie Portman's phone number on Ebay....
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.
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if it ever came up for auction.
Business.com (~8 bytes): $5,000,000
Natalie Portman's phone number (~9 bytes): priceless
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
> I've heard of Everquest accounts sold for upwards of a thousand dollars... Considering that what is actually for sale is just an username and password, which generally comes up to less than 20 bytes in total, this amounts to over $50 per byte.
...
Well, the money is being paid (presumably) for the stats and inventory of that user. So saying the 'value per byte' based on the metrics of the key is like saying that paying 1000$ for a key to a safety deposit box with 1000$ in it works out to (1000/metrics-of-key)$
So the real cost-per-byte number for these EQ accounts relates to how many bytes are in a full player record for an EQ account.
Anyhow, I'm sure some company out there has paid in the thousands for a few lines of code.
This does make me think about my 'Guiness Book of World Records That We'll Never Know' book I wish I could have. Whats the furthest a rental cars keys have ever been from its associated car, and is there an interesting story about it? You get the idea
"Old man yells at systemd"
bill gates' ATM pin.
four-oh-four
How about the RSA factoring challenge? The biggest prize is $200,000 for the 2048 bit key (256 bytes). That makes it about $781 per byte.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Well, I posted on the root level that license keys are probably the most expensive byte for byte, because in that case it is different, usually you have the full software installed, for free, and you just need to pay for the license key to use it. Almost all expensive software comes with a demo key before you buy it, but it ships with the full software package, so you can just unlock it once you get it integrated into your workflows.
To extend your analogy, it's like getting the house built on your land with the option to tear it down if you don't want to pay for the keys.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Give a man a fish and tomorrow and he will be hungry the day after. Teach a man to fish, and he will subsist. Certainly, algorithms then are the most valuable. Take DeCSS - how many bytes was that down to? Look at it's financial, freedom, and legal implications.
Even more importantly - look at WWII German Enigma codes - the decoding of any one single message was certainly valuable, but understanding how to decode it was invaluable. Like life - power is knowledge, and understanding is inferring knowledge where before there was none (read: understanding creates power).
cheers
On credit card transactions, the actual transaction is what's being purchased. The bank actually purchases the transaction from the merchant. They then sell it to Visa, Who sells it to the Issuing bank who then charges the person's account. It's odd, but that's actually how it works. And since some people buy houses (and corporations buy inventories) with a single credit card transaction, that's a lock of buck for the byte.
No Zen is good zen
This article, The Name Game cites these firms charging around $75,000 for a single word that may only be seven letters long. Not a logo, not an ad campaign, not even a domain registration, just the single word. I guess this runs roughly around $10,000 per byte.
It's like a server.. You can '0wn' a server by having the root password (or access as root), but you don't actually _own_ it.. The real owner can just pull the plug, and mount the hd somewhere else to change the password.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
The Melissa worm :)
;)
Now thinking about how a proper reference monitor could have been implemented in outlook to completely avoid this worm and all the others, and how these implementations are often just a few hundred lines of code - I vote for the "missing reference monitor" in Outlook to be the most expensive *missing* data out there
(See TCSEC for a description of the reference monitor concept, if you don't know about it)
These have been arguably one of the most expensive bits in human history.
S
From Steven Levy's recent Wired article:
"I've got to ask you," I say. "How long do you envision this rule of the universe to be?"
"I'm guessing it's really very short."
"Like how long?"
"I don't know. In Mathematica, for example, perhaps three, four lines of code."
"Four lines of code?"
"That's what I'm guessing..."
The entire premise of the post is that you DONT own the character file. That is the property of the software company. All you buy is the info to access. That is why this is different than any real property, like a house.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Thats a pretty stupid way how to count that. At this rate the most expensive piece of information would be the numbers of Bill Gate's bank accounts or something of that sort. I think that the post was just a prime troll.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Last I heard, a one-year subscription to the L Report, a website for marketers on trends among urban youth, cost $20K a year. That's just a username and password too - and companies actually shell out for it, just so they'll know that kids in Seattle these days wear color X nail polish and enjoy bowling and taking E on weekends or whatever.
I would guess that Windows NT clients are the most valuable bits, as its just one machine word which goes up to number of licences the user has. This has made billions of dollars for Microsoft, so its not a once-off thing either.
The US Department of Defense paid untold millions for zero bytes, which means there is a divide by zero error in this hypothesis. Recall that when the war on terror began the DOD bought all the time that Ikonos was over Afghanistan. This was effectively to ensure that it produced zero bytes of information.
it was only 20 odd years ago I was involved in a memory purchase for out B6700 - we paid roughly 1 million $$ for 1.5Mbytes of ram (core). And that came without any information in it .....
Any time you pay for a yes/no decision, all you've paid goes for a single bit. E.g. the millions spent on prosecution and defense of the over-hyped OJ Simpson trial all paid for the bit '0'. Similarly if you spend millions of dollars to business consultants to answer a question like 'should HP and Compaq merge?'
It is debatable whether these really are paying for just one bit - the OJ trial produced lots of public information, and the yes/no business descisions undoubtedly come with heafty reports explaining how the result was arrived at.
A test is to imagine an oracle that will (with known 100% accuracy) answer a question like 'If OJ goes to trial for murder, will he be found guilty?' If this result would be considered a sufficient substitute for actually holding the trial, then all those millions were indeed spent on one bit.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Let's save time and say that the human genome is a round 750 MB (it's about 3 gigabases, each base is two bits, so it's 750 MB.)
It cost about US $300 million. The project cost of 3 bil, bandied about, is the amount we expect to spend in the period from about 1990 to 2005 (reference, search page for "billion") on projects related to Genomics, which is the study of biological sequences, not just the human genome but a wealth of other information (including information about protein structures and the like - I generated four gigs of analytical information just this afternoon.)
Regardless, if you say that the fruit of the $300 million spent directly on the human genome is ONLY the human genome, and not all of the other data (such as correlations with other genomes which is what I was evaluating today, or the information about the number of genes, etc.) it still works out to about $US 0.40 a byte (300 bil over 750 MB). Dear, but not even in the running for most expensive data ever.
A pricing problem - do you pay for the source code, or the binary? If you're paying for the source code, I'm sure somebody, sometime, charged a full years salary to develop a Perl program 70 or 80 ASCII characters long. It could run hundreds of dollars a byte, easy.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
How much can I get for the string "The middle east is made of glass"
The launch codes that enable the president to launch a nuclear attack could probably be considered the most valuable "password" ever.
I cannot remember the exact (or even approximate date) but at some point during the history of the British Empire (i believe between about 1550-1850) the King has a series of watchtowers built, streaching all the way from the atlantic ocean to London itself. The idea was to have the tower by the sea be on the lookout for the spanish Armada, and to light a signal fire in the tower to signal to the next tower, and to the next tower, and so on , until the signal reached London. The construction and staffing of these towers would literally have cost a King's forture, the equivelent of many billions or trillions of dollars today. And the entire purpose was to pass on the signal fire - a SINGLE bit of information. Not even a byte, just a bit. I believe this is the most costly piece of binary data ever transmitted.
Both of my girls are wonderfull, but geez kids cost a lot (money, time, worry). Definitly not an investment to be made lightly, but the dividends can be enourmous at times. :-)
How about the source code to one of LLNL/LANL's nuclear weapons codes? One of those things is simply beyond price.
That's nothing compared to the cost of a single panorama from the Venera probe series. Considering the number of probes they vapourised under testing here on Earth and killed on the way down to Venus, probably in the tens of megabucks per bit, for a few thousand bits.
They also sent back most of the first picture from the Moon after several failures and had the sender die partway through the image, using earlier, perhaps therefore costlier technology, but OTOH also had a bathtub rover (Lunakhod) up there running around for years taking holiday snaps.
Either project covers a lot of goats, a lot of sex, or both.
I don't know how you bitify handwriting, but the Yanks spent a bazillion dollars developing a pen that worked in vacuum at any temperature. The Russians used a pencil.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"/."
There's two really expensive bytes. Just consider all the lost productivity. Oh the humanity...
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Hint for moderators: laugh or don't laugh. not a troll.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Business.com went for $8,000,000, $666,666.66 ber byte.
Considering that what is actually for sale is just an username and password, which generally comes up to less than 20 bytes in total, this amounts to over $50 per byte.
If you consider how much the entertainment industry paid for the DMCA, it could easily be the most expensive 4 byte sequence there is. Say, for example, that $5 million was paid for it...this would come out to $1.25 million per byte, or $156250 per bit. (Note that I'm not trying to be a troll here. Depending on what angle you look at it from, there could be a certain degree of truth to what I just said, as sad as it may be.)
I'm sure the MPAA would put quite a large number on those keys...
And remember, the keys themselves have value as art.
While on the subject of money for information here is some weird inforation in money.
I don't believe in a conspiracy here, but that's a pretty strange coincedence. A friend refers to it as evidence of a higher power.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
As said by Melinda Gates. That's a lot for just one bit.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
Actually, it is 0 bits, if the answer (42) is correct, and the question is known. This is because any other "Deep Thought" box can provide this answer without access to the number 42 before or during computations. That's basic theory of information. Also, the answer "is it day or night" at a random time carries 1 bit of information; the same answer only during the day carries 0 bits.
This is a fiction from Hollywood. For example, the commanders of a nuclear submarine can launch their nuclear weapons whenever they want to.
It has to be this way. Otherwise disabling the American nuclear arsenal would be as easy as killing the handful of people who have the codes, or even just blocking their communications.
It's interesting to think about the value that such things have. Essentially, the value lies, as I said, in the particular formation of data on Verant's servers, in San Diego (or wherever the actual machines happen to be, due to colocation). If you had actual physical access to those machines, you could simply create the data to be whatever you want -- a level 60 Barbarian Warrior with the best gear in the game, for example.
However, physical access to the data substrate is not feasible, for a variety of reasons. Only trusted employees are allowed physical access to that areas. Brute force may give you temporary physical access, but the variety of law enforcement agencies blanketing our society would (on average) put the kibosh on that fairly quickly. As a result, the only plausible way to create the data the way you want, is to use the relatively public interface mechanisms Verant provides -- namely, the game interface itself.
The amount of time and effort it takes, using that interface, to get the data into the form you want, is why the data has that value. A bad Verant employee with legitimate access to the data might also be able to create such value by quickly creating characters with such data, but they are unlikely to go long without getting caught.
Yeah, this all may seem fairly obvious, but did you ever actually sit down and think it through before? I didn't think so ;)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
How much did Deep Thought cost to build, just to cough up 42? That was one mighty darn expensive byte...
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
How much would it be worth to have a few hundred bytes which would allow you to create certificates which would be trusted by almost everyone on the internet?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Well, Sun swears that their operating system source code is worth exactly $80 million.
That might not work out to be more on a per-byte basis than the Everquest account, but try amassing 80,000 Everquest accounts worth one grand apiece.
I've heard various versions of this story over the years, but the best link I can find attributes it to a General Electric engineer named Charles Steinmetz (1865-1923):
One day a whole roomful of General Electric's most expensive machinery went out of order. By this time Steinmetz had retired, but the company's baffled engineers called him back as a consultant. Steinmetz ambled from machine to machine, taking a measurement here, scribbling something in his noteboook there. After about an hour, he took out a large piece of chalk and marked a large 'X' on the casing of one machine. Workers pried off the casing and found the problem at once.
When the company executives got Steinmetz's bill for $10,000, they were reluctant to pay it. "This seems a bit excessive for one chalk mark," Steinmetz was told. "Perhaps you'd better itemize your charges."
Within a few days, they received the following itemized bill:
Making one chalk mark $1.00
Knowing where to make one chalk mark $9,999.00
Actually, it is 0 bits...
This information is invaluable. More specifically, this equates to [FPE Exception: Divide by Zero] in USD per byte!
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
That must be one really big company...
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Are obviously the most valuable ones. Especially the ones that authenticate themselves (Chipcards, Digicash, etc). Break one and put your value of choice in there.
because it's the 50th bank account / credit card # post in this forum
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
a senator's vote
1/0
depending on the issue and the senator, it's a few tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. but don't be fooled, they're all for sale.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I'd have to say the most "expensive" bits of information had to be the notes that Klaus Fuchs passed from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. Estimates I've seen are that the material was no more than four dozen full pages, but that material was the key to allowing the Soviet Union to finish their Atomic bomb research years ahead of time (providing at least a 5-year jump). For an estimate of what the Manhattan Project cost, look here. For a conservative estimate, I'd say that those 50 pages (~2000 characters each = 100kB) saved some $10 Billion in research costs. And that's in 1945 dollars.
The German, Italian, and Japanese cypher codes were similarly valuable, though not quite as expensive to obtain.
Historically, I'd say that the $50 in trinkets that Dutch explorers paid to the Native Americans living on Manhattan Island for title to their island (ie, for the signature on the treaty giving the Dutch what became New York City) was the ultimate rip-off (or, great deal, depending on which way you look at it). Signature = ~25 bytes, with current value of the Manhattan Island real estate well north of $10 trillion.
As a side note, the US (and presumably the other nuclear powers) does NOT maintain the "Launch Codes" at the political level. These are AUTHORIZATION codes, which tell the military that a valid order to launch exists. The military maintains the actual launch codes (at different places for different weapon systems), so theoretically, it is possible to launch a nuclear weapon without permission. For obvious reasons, the military designs launch systems so this is as difficult as possible.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
How do you factor in the context of the info?
:-).
For example you have a program which costs $314, but it has to run under an operating system. How much value of the operating system to factor in. Without the operating system the program would be worthless (except emacs of course
Let's remember, not all bits are created equal. Each bit of information is, potentially, the answer to a single yes-or-no question, and some questions are far more important than others. Hence, some bits are worth far more than others.
Let's also remember, economists (at least free-market capitalists) will tell you that a thing is worth whatever you can get someone to pay for it. This means, of course, that value and worth are nonsensical terms and you can't ask any reasonable questions about them.
If, however, you are not a free-market capitalist, you might subscribe to the Marxist definition of value: that a thing aquires its value based on how much human effort was put into the thing. In that case, the value of access to a well used MMORPG account could be quite substantial (how much is your time worth, mine is worth quite a bit).
Finally, we must consider that even for a single bit, the two possible values (yes or no) do not always have equal worth: I would have been willing to pay far more for the yes result of the above function than for the no result. Something very similar is true for the MMORPG accounts (base on how well the account has been used).
Just a couple set-uid bits here and there made the Internet Worm possible.
Some information costs many human lives to collect.
That's why I specifically mentioned that ;-) Global truths are always like that.
if you have a general question whose answer can be any n-dimensional string of unicode characters, you will have 16 bits x n of information, i believe
No, it is not so simple. The quantity of information depends on the probability of certain symbols in certain places. For example:
Q: I want to send either "King Lear" or "Hamlet" from Mars to Earth. How much information would that be?
A: That would be one bit, even though each book has hundreds of thousands of characters. This is because one bit is all you need to fully recover the message at the receiving end.
Theory of information is an interesting subject, a required course for any RF/EE engineer. That's where your Reed-Solomon codes come from, for your magic .PAR files ;-)
LOL. I guess enough ppl followed the link that Bell.ca got slashdotted.
Yes or No can be done in one bit. Buy or Sell can be done in one bit.
:).
Just one logical bit can make a lot of difference.
Also if there is some unique irreplaceable data which is priceless and it's encrypted using strong encryption, the key would be worth a lot don't you think?
I suppose the question needs a lot more beer to make it seem fun
Start here, this is an introduction.
Then, beyond any doubt, you should read Shannon's original paper, published in 1948. There is some math involved (the course is normally taken on 4th year in a University), but don't worry.
Snannon's 1948 paper, and Kotelnikov's math (from 1933) laid the foundation of the information theory as we know it.
The guy had disabled the price reasonability checks so the order was sent though. Of course it matched against everything so it was impossible to reverse out the trade. Each point in the index is 25 Euros so the total loss represented by the trade is 91 million Euros. It didn't completely execute so the complete value wasn't blown, however, the reduction in the value of the DAX probably caused at least that amount of damage to index linked funds.
Swift passwords aren't bad either (Interbank transfer system) for value per byte if you have a larcenous frame of mind and access to their network. Don't even ask how much gets misappropriated and the transactions are irrevocable.
How about those 7 digits on a million dollar bill.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
It's not a "sale", it's a "share". ;-)
Actually, it's often a rental. Check out the EQ message boards and you'll see some horror stories about people "buying" characters, changing the password, then having the seller call up EQ customer support, say "I've forgotten my password," and having it reset, thereby reclaiming the character to be sold again. And there's not a damn thing that you can do about it, because EQ characters remain the property of EQ (Sony, actually) and can't be sold or transferred. All you can do is squeal that the seller is trading, get his EQ (and probably eBay) account pulled and try and get your money back (good luck).
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Famously, the Rothschild brothers (who organised the finance for most of the 1815 alliance against Napoleon) got news of the victory at Waterloo back to London a day ahead of anyone else ... and did rather well.
I heard about a year ago that the value of coca cola in assetts is about 3 billion. By this I mean that if you added up all the property, investments and cash you could sell it for about 3 billion. However, their stock on the market (when I heard this about a year ago) is worth around 150 billion. The brand name and its solidity is worth far more than the company itself.
I agree with the original poster that successful branding is a tremendous commodity.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
I periodically get a credit card offer from my alma mater, freely offering a $100,000 limit. If they're pushing a card with a limit high enough to buy a house on impulse, I'm sure I could negotiate a higher limit; maybe not in the millions, but likely a large fraction thereof. Ironically, my income is rather modest, so I don't understand why they keep offering me a card that could require several years of my net income to pay off.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Well, no, we still ended up net losers on the deal.
War, as I have to keep pointing out, is NOT good for the economy.
Yes, GDP goes up, but the war-products we made in WWII:
1) Killed human beings.
2) Blew up, stuck in things, or sank in the ocean.
3) Created a depression in Europe that made the Great Depression look like a royal wedding.
Peaceful economy is always better overall than war economy, though pockets of profit attract attention from the gross disaster. America, being unscathed by destruction, appeared to have reversed the effects of the Depression. In fact we lost all we made in war materiel, plus tens of thousands of lives, and went deep into a debt that we've never paid off. It's a terrible ruse.
--Blair
Cancer and heart disease are very very tough problems, it's unlikely that any single miracle drug is going to make a significant dent in the death toll.
wheras a media frenzy over an unsafe, untested new drug could cause all kinds of harm...
no, i'll stick to skepticism and scientific accuracy, thank you.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!