We run DreamBook, a free guestbook service with about a million members, and recently the guestbook spam started getting to the point we had no choice but to do something about it. We think the way they get the list of our user's URLs is just through a google search (which has the added benefit of returning the most trafficed books where their spam will potentially be the most widely viewed).
Originally the spam was just huge lists of porn sites, from a few specific spammers. To fight that, we kludgingly added some specific urls we wouldn't allow in any post.
They figured that out, and we started getting more from all sorts of different people. So we started adding various heuristics that were kind of lame to block posts (no domains with a - in them for example).
They figured that out, and started to post all sorts of random spam, unrelated to porn, usually with just links to some other dreambook url. We were kind of puzzled about those, because when you went to their dreambook, it was blank. Viewing the source though, they'd added hidden links to their sites at that book. So it seemed they were spamming to get higher google results. Super.
So then we added system-wide a check for the same IP posting to multiple books a lot within a certain amount of time. That worked really well for a few months, but recently they've started using I guess a whole slew of proxies! So finally we now look for any URLs in their posts instead of IPs (they vary the messages they post so there's nothing else you can really look for) and filter on that.
So far it's working okay (but now with some false positives) but it's only a matter of time until they work around that as well.
Try doing a mutitrack session with AIFF files to a collaborator... yep, 100mb +. Broadband essential.
Hey, I'm just curious, how exactly do you send 100mb+ files to your collaborator? Do you have a webhosting account you upload to? Scp/rsync it to his computer directly? Use file sending in some IM system? Attach it to an email? or what?
I guess I'm not sure what the best way is to send really big files to somebody over the Internet!
I just wanted to point out that DreamHost is only the technical partner running the.la registrar functions, just as Afilias is the technical partner running the.la registry.
The new company is "LANames Corporation", and they got the rights from LANIC. Apparently Sterling had never actually had the rights to register.la domains to the general public. They were only brought on to manage.la domains for Laos domestically. Laos found out what they were doing and had IANA redelegate the domain to LANIC.
The worst thing is right when Sterling knew things were finally coming to an end, they sent out an email "promotion" to existing customers to renew at dirt cheap prices (like $150 for 5 years, $200 for 10 years). They then took the money and didn't even update the whois records to reflect the renewals (at that point they didn't even have access to them).
I'd recommend trying to charge back the charges with your credit card company or sue Sterling directly to get the money back!
Guy Rosbrook - rosbrook@qwest.net: he is the COO who had been illegally running.la.
Sterling's lawyers are:
Brad Russell, Esq McCullough Robertson Level 12 Central Plaza Two 66 Eagle Street Brisbane, Qld 4000 Australia email: brussell@mccullough.com.au Tel + 617 3233 8888 Fax + 617 3229 9949
So Apple sold 2 million songs in about 2 weeks at 99 cents each, right?
Why would these people buy these songs instead of just downloading them for free on Kazaa/Gnutella/etc?
Getting a song for free:
- cost: $0
- ease of use: pretty easy
- time to get: depends
- availability: depends
- quality: depends
- platform: mp3s will play on any system
- usage restrictions: none
- legality: not legal.
Getting a song from apple:
- cost: 99c / song, $9.99 / album
- ease of use: really easy
- time to get: really fast
- availability: about 20% of commercial music
- quality: guaranteed good.
- platform: mac only
- usage restrictions: medium-restrictive D.R.M.
- legality: legal.
And those are basically all the issues.
So apparently, ease of use + time to get + quality + legal vs cost + platform + restrictions results in $1 million a week for apple. Not too shabby!
Now what if they dropped the last two strikes against them (besides cost).. platform and usability restrictions? As they upped their cd library they'd soon find the ONLY advantage Kazaa would have would be price, whereas apple would now win (or at least tie) in every other category! How much money would they maybe gross then?
They make $1M a week now right? Let's say opening up the service to non-mac users (95%+ of the users) only triples their revenues. Let's say dropping all restrictions on use again doubles the usage. Finally, let's say them quintupling their collection to include everything ever recorded doubles their revenues again. It looks like they stand to make about $625 Million a year from this service.. if they'd just loosen up on the DRM (and complete their selection)!
It's true you don't need a memory card, but you still need 007 Agent Under Fire to do this.
I think it's less work and easier to do it with a memory card though. This method requires hooking the xbox drive up to your pc and a lot of recompiling kernel stuff.. the other way just requires you putting some files on a memory card (you can do it with a previously modded xbox or a couple of other ways) and that's it. Once you've got that memory card you can reuse it on each xbox you want to mod too. It takes about 90 seconds to get an unmodded-xbox to run linux with the memory card:
Turn on xbox with no cd in drive, but with memory card in controller.
Use the MS dashboard to copy the 007 save game to the harddrive.
Put in 007 Agent Under Fire and reboot.
Wait for lots of annoying intro stuff.
Choose "Load Mission", pick the game off the hard drive.
Unfortunately, without serious corporate backing, Jabber is likely to stay within the techie circle (like Linux).
We're doing our best right now at DreamHost to help this whole thing out. We're working on adding jabber servers as a standard feature on all our web hosting accounts. When we're done, hopefully within the next month, setting up your own jabber server, with your own accounts at your domain name will be just a matter of checking a box on our web panel. Hopefully if we can get a lot of our users to start using it, other hosts will begin offering it, and before long "vanity" im accounts will become as popular as "vanity" email addresses. Then it's just a matter of reaching a critical mass and having more and more users realize how cool it is to use your own im server instead of aols!
I've got the afterburner backlight so I can actually see my screen!
I've got the 256Mbit flash cartridge so I can load roms onto it!
I've got PocketNES v7a NES emulator with over 100 of my favorite NES games installed!
It all cost $69 (GBA) + $35 (afterburner) + $159 (256mbit flash) + $45 (linker for copying roms to flash) = about $300! Hey, that's kinda expensive. BUT WORTH IT.
What about the sony u1 that slashdot already had an article about?
It weighs less (820grams) has smaller dimensions (184.5 x 139 x 30.6) and has virtually the same specs (but with an 867MHz Crusoe instead and only a 20GB drive).
I just wanted to point out that although it doesn't mention it on their site you CAN actually add a unique ip (which includes anonymous ftp and ssl with it) to any of their plans for $4.95/month.
Also it's $4.95/month for 3 extra domains on any plan. So you could get for $30/month 10 fully hosted domains and unique ip/anon ftp/ssl.
so are you paying just $7.50/month now for your 10 full domains?
Another thing people always seem to fail to notice with the computer to car comparison is just how fragmented the car market is!
BMW and MB may have less than 4.5% of the market combined, but there ain't no car manufacturer with 95% of the market, not even close.
Apple's 4.5% share seems a lot less relevant when compared to the 95% Windows has, than BMW having 3% when the number one manufacturer (toyota) probably only has about 10%!
obviously prot was not human.
on
Review: K-PAX
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
he could see ultra violet, remember? That's pretty unambiguous evidence that he's from K-PAX (or at least SOME other planet). There was the stuff about him being immune to the drugs and disappearing for 3 days to go up north too. But just the ultra violet part should be enough to take any ambiguity out of the movie, right?
In practice though, it's pretty much impossible for you to actually get a.us domain, even blah.city.state.us. My friend and I applied for one about a year ago and never heard a word from them since. We tried to get lovett.in.us (for lovett,indiana) because we thought that things like we.lovett.in.us would make for good porn!
we also tried gateway, Colorado (gateway.co.us). They never wrote back. It's pretty shady!
Is a standard protocol for passing hashes to a server and receiving a hash in reply. Then all sorts of different platforms and programming languages could create a wrapper to that interface. So in perl you could call
%returnhash = sendhash('domain.com','port',%hash);
or something like that.
I've written an interface to CyberCash and to the Tucows OpenSRS system and they implement this in entirely different ways, that both require installing their own perl libraries and learning their own syntax. They could easily have been implemented in a one standard way though. There just doesn't seem to be one for everybody to use.
Basically this seems to be what ms is trying to come up with with.net. It doesn't seem particularly difficult though. Really that's all we need: to be able to pass a hash to a domain:port and to get a hash back (probably there'd be a standard status field... 200, 404, etc.. but the rest would be whatever fields are definied by their API). Services like MapQuest could return a jpg when you pass it an address in your hash. Services like slashdot could return an article (or all articles, or whatever). Services like etrade could return stock prices. We can get all this information already, but with this standard interface there'd be no parsing html or crazy hacks like WebQL!
Does anyone know if there's anything like this already? And if so, why nobody uses it? And if not, ideas on how to get it out there?
Slashdot Mirror
okay for all you guys who want in but didn't give me any way to figure out your email address.. paypal me at:
josh at newdream dot net
anybody I get a $1 paypal from in the next day or so, I'll assume want to be invited!
Dude, I'll totally let you in for $1!
In fact, anybody who wants in, paypal me $1.
Except.. orkut is down again now (BAD REQUEST (INVALID URL)). Nice job google. Maybe next time spend less time on booble and more time on google.
But seriously, anybody who wants in, reply to this post. Or is it just totally open now anyway?
but I can't wait until these things take off!
I want to be able to pay for everything with RFID!
I want to be able to open my house with RFID!
I want to be able to start my car with it!
and then I want one embedded in my thumb!
Is that too much to ask?
Not in America!
We run DreamBook, a free guestbook service with about a million members, and recently the guestbook spam started getting to the point we had no choice but to do something about it. We think the way they get the list of our user's URLs is just through a google search (which has the added benefit of returning the most trafficed books where their spam will potentially be the most widely viewed).
Originally the spam was just huge lists of porn sites, from a few specific spammers. To fight that, we kludgingly added some specific urls we wouldn't allow in any post.
They figured that out, and we started getting more from all sorts of different people. So we started adding various heuristics that were kind of lame to block posts (no domains with a - in them for example).
They figured that out, and started to post all sorts of random spam, unrelated to porn, usually with just links to some other dreambook url. We were kind of puzzled about those, because when you went to their dreambook, it was blank. Viewing the source though, they'd added hidden links to their sites at that book. So it seemed they were spamming to get higher google results. Super.
So then we added system-wide a check for the same IP posting to multiple books a lot within a certain amount of time. That worked really well for a few months, but recently they've started using I guess a whole slew of proxies! So finally we now look for any URLs in their posts instead of IPs (they vary the messages they post so there's nothing else you can really look for) and filter on that.
So far it's working okay (but now with some false positives) but it's only a matter of time until they work around that as well.
Bastards!
Try doing a mutitrack session with AIFF files to a collaborator ... yep, 100mb +. Broadband essential.
Hey, I'm just curious, how exactly do you send 100mb+ files to your collaborator? Do you have a webhosting account you upload to? Scp/rsync it to his computer directly? Use file sending in some IM system? Attach it to an email? or what?
I guess I'm not sure what the best way is to send really big files to somebody over the Internet!
I don't go around telling people I'm 8'11" just because it's my theoretical maximum!
As Chris Rock put it:
"You make $35 million and your wife wants half, it's no big deal. You ain't starving.
But if you make $35 _thousand_ and your wife wants half...
you might have to kill her."
I just wanted to point out that DreamHost is only the technical partner running the .la registrar functions, just as Afilias is the technical partner running the .la registry.
.la domains to the general public. They were only brought on to manage .la domains for Laos domestically. Laos found out what they were doing and had IANA redelegate the domain to LANIC.
.la.
The new company is "LANames Corporation", and they got the rights from LANIC. Apparently Sterling had never actually had the rights to register
The worst thing is right when Sterling knew things were finally coming to an end, they sent out an email "promotion" to existing customers to renew at dirt cheap prices (like $150 for 5 years, $200 for 10 years). They then took the money and didn't even update the whois records to reflect the renewals (at that point they didn't even have access to them).
I'd recommend trying to charge back the charges with your credit card company or sue Sterling directly to get the money back!
Guy Rosbrook - rosbrook@qwest.net: he is the COO who had been illegally running
Sterling's lawyers are:
Brad Russell, Esq
McCullough Robertson
Level 12 Central Plaza Two
66 Eagle Street
Brisbane, Qld 4000
Australia
email: brussell@mccullough.com.au
Tel + 617 3233 8888
Fax + 617 3229 9949
Having said that, what happens when the people of Laos decide they want to use their TLD?
.la domains for use within the country.. com.la, net.la, mil.la, gov.la, and about 140 more.
Actually, Laos reserved a bunch of
I believe they're getting something in the range of 20% of all revenues from the domains.
Maybe they can use the money to pay for those laonix pcs..
Does anybody know any web hosts that support Jabber on shared hosting?
So Apple sold 2 million songs in about 2 weeks at 99 cents each, right?
Why would these people buy these songs instead of just downloading them for free on Kazaa/Gnutella/etc?
Getting a song for free:
- cost: $0
- ease of use: pretty easy
- time to get: depends
- availability: depends
- quality: depends
- platform: mp3s will play on any system
- usage restrictions: none
- legality: not legal.
Getting a song from apple:
- cost: 99c / song, $9.99 / album
- ease of use: really easy
- time to get: really fast
- availability: about 20% of commercial music
- quality: guaranteed good.
- platform: mac only
- usage restrictions: medium-restrictive D.R.M.
- legality: legal.
And those are basically all the issues.
So apparently, ease of use + time to get + quality + legal vs cost + platform + restrictions results in $1 million a week for apple. Not too shabby!
Now what if they dropped the last two strikes against them (besides cost).. platform and usability restrictions? As they upped their cd library they'd soon find the ONLY advantage Kazaa would have would be price, whereas apple would now win (or at least tie) in every other category! How much money would they maybe gross then?
They make $1M a week now right? Let's say opening up the service to non-mac users (95%+ of the users) only triples their revenues. Let's say dropping all restrictions on use again doubles the usage. Finally, let's say them quintupling their collection to include everything ever recorded doubles their revenues again. It looks like they stand to make about $625 Million a year from this service.. if they'd just loosen up on the DRM (and complete their selection)!
No, it doesn't matter.. once you've flashed to a non-ms bios you can reflash it whether or not you have those two jumpers bridged or not.
Um, no!
It's true you don't need a memory card, but you still need 007 Agent Under Fire to do this.
I think it's less work and easier to do it with a memory card though. This method requires hooking the xbox drive up to your pc and a lot of recompiling kernel stuff.. the other way just requires you putting some files on a memory card (you can do it with a previously modded xbox or a couple of other ways) and that's it. Once you've got that memory card you can reuse it on each xbox you want to mod too. It takes about 90 seconds to get an unmodded-xbox to run linux with the memory card:
Yeah, the game _looked_ cool, but it played like a "rat touches button, gets shocked" experiment.
My experience with dragon's lair:
life 1:
2 seconds: dirk walking towards a castle.
2 seconds: pause.
2 seconds: dead dirk with skulls
life 2:
2 seconds: dirk crossing a bridge
2 seconds: pause.
2 seconds: dead dirk with skulls
life 3:
2 seconds: dirk sees some gold.
2 seconds: pause.
??
2 seconds: profit.
Well, pretty close.. and it only cost about $350!
One xbox. $199
one mod chip. $31
one 120GB drive. $120 (although if you just want to stream your media from your computer you don't need this).
There's mame, and nes, snes, genesis, sms, atari 2600, gameboy, gameboy advance, atari lynx and commodore 64 emulators for it.
There's xbmp to play just about every audio and video file format in existance.
There's even a way to connect a usb tv tuner and get some tivo functionality (though I don't have that.. kazaa is my tivo!).
It plays dvds and regular cds too.
Oh yeah, and xbox games! And xbox (and nes games!) over the Internet.
And also basically serves as my home file server, since its 120GB drive is the biggest thing in my house.
I just wish it was all legal.
Unfortunately, without serious corporate backing, Jabber is likely to stay within the techie circle (like Linux).
We're doing our best right now at DreamHost to help this whole thing out. We're working on adding jabber servers as a standard feature on all our web hosting accounts. When we're done, hopefully within the next month, setting up your own jabber server, with your own accounts at your domain name will be just a matter of checking a box on our web panel. Hopefully if we can get a lot of our users to start using it, other hosts will begin offering it, and before long "vanity" im accounts will become as popular as "vanity" email addresses. Then it's just a matter of reaching a critical mass and having more and more users realize how cool it is to use your own im server instead of aols!
Ha Ha Ha!
I've got the afterburner backlight so I can actually see my screen!
I've got the 256Mbit flash cartridge so I can load roms onto it!
I've got PocketNES v7a NES emulator with over 100 of my favorite NES games installed!
It all cost $69 (GBA) + $35 (afterburner) + $159 (256mbit flash) + $45 (linker for copying roms to flash) = about $300! Hey, that's kinda expensive. BUT WORTH IT.
HA HA HA!
What about the sony u1 that slashdot already had an article about?
It weighs less (820grams) has smaller dimensions (184.5 x 139 x 30.6) and has virtually the same specs (but with an 867MHz Crusoe instead and only a 20GB drive).
It also costs way less! 149,800 yen.
I just wanted to point out that although it doesn't mention it on their site you CAN actually add a unique ip (which includes anonymous ftp and ssl with it) to any of their plans for $4.95/month.
Also it's $4.95/month for 3 extra domains on any plan. So you could get for $30/month 10 fully hosted domains and unique ip/anon ftp/ssl.
so are you paying just $7.50/month now for your 10 full domains?
yup.
Another thing people always seem to fail to notice with the computer to car comparison is just how fragmented the car market is!
BMW and MB may have less than 4.5% of the market combined, but there ain't no car manufacturer with 95% of the market, not even close.
Apple's 4.5% share seems a lot less relevant when compared to the 95% Windows has, than BMW having 3% when the number one manufacturer (toyota) probably only has about 10%!
he could see ultra violet, remember? That's pretty unambiguous evidence that he's from K-PAX (or at least SOME other planet). There was the stuff about him being immune to the drugs and disappearing for 3 days to go up north too. But just the ultra violet part should be enough to take any ambiguity out of the movie, right?
In practice though, it's pretty much impossible for you to actually get a .us domain, even blah.city.state.us. My friend and I applied for one about a year ago and never heard a word from them since. We tried to get lovett.in.us (for lovett,indiana) because we thought that things like we.lovett.in.us would make for good porn!
we also tried gateway, Colorado (gateway.co.us). They never wrote back. It's pretty shady!
there's nothing stopping people from registering things like 555-1212.com for example.. right now!
%returnhash = sendhash('domain.com','port',%hash);
or something like that.
I've written an interface to CyberCash and to the Tucows OpenSRS system and they implement this in entirely different ways, that both require installing their own perl libraries and learning their own syntax. They could easily have been implemented in a one standard way though. There just doesn't seem to be one for everybody to use.
Basically this seems to be what ms is trying to come up with with .net. It doesn't seem particularly difficult though. Really that's all we need: to be able to pass a hash to a domain:port and to get a hash back (probably there'd be a standard status field... 200, 404, etc.. but the rest would be whatever fields are definied by their API). Services like MapQuest could return a jpg when you pass it an address in your hash. Services like slashdot could return an article (or all articles, or whatever). Services like etrade could return stock prices. We can get all this information already, but with this standard interface there'd be no parsing html or crazy hacks like WebQL!
Does anyone know if there's anything like this already? And if so, why nobody uses it? And if not, ideas on how to get it out there?