Well, of course not. The last administration saw fit to "share" our nuclear secrets with them. Heck, I'd be pretty jolly with the government if they were giving me specs for nuclear weapons, too.
Well, I know my girlfriend's parents bought TurboTax this year, and definitely used it. They also tend to be pretty concerned about digital privacy and such like this - I'm sure they'd be interested in getting it off their machine For one untrained in the ways of the boot track, how might I go about removing it? I've played with the MBR and such, and even had a virus infect my boot record before, but what's the proper method for removing this thing? Assembly?;)
Do the virus scanners catch this? If so, can they restore an untouched copy of the boot track?
They'd have to have valid reply-to fields in order to receive bounces to prune their DB with, so I'd say no. A spammer isn't like a telemarketer - it doesn't take 30 seconds to find out that a number is bad. For a spammer, sending to a DB with only 10% valid addresses is trivial. CPU time and bandwidth are cheap, and as we've seen, they shrug off the consequenses of their bad DBs onto innocents.
I swear, if I ever meet a spammer, I'm using his CD tray and a pair of razor blades to castrate him. Fix the blades in place, drop and chop. The least we can do is prevent people like spammers from propagating their genes.
That's what I'm thinking. One little exec() call is just as dangerous as this thing.
I wrote a "shell emulator" in PHP a while back that took a command from POST, exec'ed it, and returned the output to the user. It's not exactly as if this is anything fundamentally different.
Yes, you can call system commands from the shell, people. Big deal. Years ago, I wrote a recursive file list/navigation tool that would let me navigate all the files in all the other webuser accounts on the machine. This is hardly a new problem.
App-level firewalls do this already, and do so quite nicely. Tiny Personal Firewall performs MD5s of any application that attempts net traffic, and will alert you if the MD5 changes, and block traffic until you approve the change.
Quite useful, really.
I once wrote a phoenetic search engine for a site that took keywords and broke them down into their soundex phonemes, then stored those. Then, when a search was executed, it would convert the text words into phoenetic pieces and search the database for matches. It was quite accurate, actually. For example, one could search for "olif ghardin" and one of the returned results would be "olive garden".
I have to wonder how much of that effect comes from "block spamming" where a spammer just mails alphanumeric combos in the hotmail domain. I've noticed from personal experience that shorter addresses tend to get spammed more quickly, and it only takes one well-coded image to flag your account as good.
Just a thought.
Re:What a waste(no pun intended)...
on
Tornado in a Can
·
· Score: 2
Nah...they were pre-crushing them for use in McDonalds' McFlurries.
I've been through the Eryxma route, too. I got the impression that they were kinda a 1- or 2-man shop, and there were some rumors on webhosting boards about them being less than legit. Nothing substantiated, but it was enough to make me shy away from them.
I'm using phpwebhosting.com now, and couldn't be happier. They're a great solution if you can't afford Rachshack or whatever. The site in my sig is hosted with them, actually. Nice and fast, great support, geek-friendly, the works:)
You're not a game developer, are you? Probably not a really serious programmer, either. Heck, I'd be suprised if you're a coder at all, really.
Here's a hint: games aren't "hello world" apps. Their complexity and required level of interaction with hardware makes it extremely difficult to do something perfectly right the first time. In the case of a PC game, you have a program that is going to run on an incredibly diverse array of hardware configurations. With a console, this isn't an issue - you know what hardware you're programming for. Game developers, as a rule, do a damn fine job of releasing a game that performs well on most systems out there, then they patch it to accomodate for the systems that weren't handled in the lab. Game requirements continue to increase because hardware is developing further. Games get prettier and prettier. Example, UT2K3. Very high polygon counts, high-res textures, huge arenas, incredible physics system, gorgeous lighting, etc. You think all of that could be done on a p133? Hardly. That stuff takes CPU cycles, and lots of it.
The reason better hardware is required is because these games are designed around that hardware. Great looks are a big selling point for a lot of gamers (I know I'll get someone saying it's about gameplay, not graphics, but let's be honest: people will buy a pretty-looking game. I agree that gameplay is important, but graphics don't hurt.), and game devs are doing their best to make games look as good as possible. If you don't like the hardware requirements, go play with the original Quake engine. It's fast, and will run on most machines out there today with no problem, but good luck developing a game that wows anybody. Modern game standards require that kind of hardware.
Go try writing a game some time, then come back and whine about those lazy game devs.
What I really find amusing is that people will take the time to gripe about dupes. After all, those evil editors are taking our precious bandwidth by posting dupes, so we have to make sure we fight the power and complain about it!:P
Yeah, post complaints! Reload the page a few times! Damn the man!
I just find it amusing that we get an entire story of posts saying "dupe!" - as if one post wasn't enough. Nope, just in case I decide to start reading comments at the very freaking middle of the page, there will always be someone there to inform me that this story is, in fact, a dupe! I can't imagine what I would do without that valuable info! Thank you, all 400 of you, that felt the need to uniquely point out that I could have read the same article some 5 articles prior!:)
The above is not intended seriously, for the humor impaired.:D
Hell, I live in Phoenix, AZ. I'm going to complain, because people are always calling me up when they have computer problems, thinking I'm associated with Phoenix the BIOS manufacturer!
A single attack was able to take out a large amount of net routing software. A similar attack, targeted at one of the net's chokepoints could be disasterous.
It's not just a silly reference. It's a demonstration of the fact that an attack like that could have dire consequenses to the net, and at this point, there's not much we can do about it.
Now, if they'd said "Sept 11 caused people to run around screaming, tripping over datacenter cables and unplugging the net", then I would see your point, but as it stands, it's a valid example.
You hadn't heard? They were granted a patent on "a method of transferring copyrighted bits between two computers via a large scale electronic network" last week. It's such an innovation! After all, such innovators should be able to sue their way to the top, shouldn't they?
How would they check to see if you've got them downloaded? Parse the server logs on the fly? Don't think so.
The problem with the 5-second thing is this: 5 seconds is more than enough for a browser to spawn a popup. Which spawns a popup. Which spawns a popup. Which...
Any legal site that is doing enough traffic to put a dent in the owner's wallet is obviously quite appreciated. People will pay to use it. The little small sites? Of course no one is going to pay. No one goes to them. However, they also cost almost zero to run. I can get free webspace at any of the bazillion providers out there to put up a page about my dog. If I want to do something dynamic, I can pay phpwebhosting.com $10/month for all the tools I need, and a dynamic website is probably going to generate a bit more traffic than your stadnard Frontpage hack job. If you actually have a job, $10/month isn't going to be a big problem. I'm a college student making $15/hr at my day job. In one 8-hour work day, I will have made enough money to run my site for a year, assuming bandwidth costs are negligible.
If it bothers you that people don't vigorously shake you hand for creating a site, then you need to reevaluate your approach to the web. Unless you manage to create the next Yahoo or something, people don't really care. Are they at fault for not sending you mail thanking you for your wonderful site? I'd hardly say so. Do strangers waking by your house stop by to say "Nice job on the lawn! That's really something! You must have put a lot of work into it!"? I've never experienced anything like that.
I have a girlfriend, a social life, school, a family of 5 other people to interact with, and I still manage to work 30 hours a week at the office and develop websites on the side. The "no time" is really not an issue. Take an notebook with you for a week, and write down everything you do with the times you spent doing it. At the end of the week, tally the gaps. I -guarantee- you there will be a lot. If my father, who works to provide for a family of six, maintains relationships with friends, practices and plays in the church band, and goes hiking for 4 hours every Saturday can find time to study for an MBA, then chances are most people can find extra time for the things they want to do, too.
If you want money from people, charge them for something. The idea that popups are the only way to make money on the web is faulty at best.
If people think your site's worthwhile, they will pay to support it. If no one likes it, they're not going to pay. Simple as that.
If no one likes your site, you're probably just polluting, anyway:)
With sites such as warez and serialz sites, I can see why popups would be so prevalent - they don't really have any other method of supporting their massive bandwidth needs, since they can't really resort to a customer-appreciation method - people that are downloading warez all day long probably don't want their subscription info in a personal database or anything, and they're obviously the kind of people that aren't going to pay for something if they don't absolutely have to. The less legal areas of the web use popups like none other. I see -no- reason for a legit site to use them.
On a completely different tack, I've thought of a way to make bunches of money, but can't implement it due to that pesky consciounce of mine. Spam that spawns dozens of popups. The ultimate in invasive advertising. Probably very lucrative, sadly.
Marketing execs are such pushovers. Just say 'on the internet" and they'll jump all over it.
A better solution is just to have code that tells the javascript in the page that the popup is active without actually opening it. That way, the browser -thinks- it opened a window, but it didn't. Not exactly rocket science.
Of course, you could then get really tricky, such as setting a cookie via popup, or something like that, but you're just going to alienate a large audience that doesn't accept cookies anyway.
Anyway, back to my question though, how SHOULD people make money from their websites? Or should thousands of people in the world just work their butts off to give YOU stuff for free?
Anyone who has ever tried to produce something worthwhile, such as a website, in their spare time, in addition to having a full-time job, will probably understand these sentiments.
Note: reading my preview, this post sounds quite holier-than-thou - not intended at all. This isn't an attack, just the perceptions of a web developer. Now, on to the content!
I'm a pro web developer, and put up sites all over in my spare time just for the heck of it - not little pansy Frontpage sites, PHP/SQL sites that I've sunk a lot of time and effort into.
I have yet to ever put a single banner, popup, or paid button ad on any site of mine. Honestly, $10 or $12/month is quite negligible, and it gives you a presence on the web. If you don't like it, then get off. The way to make money on the web is ot through advertising, but by offering a service that people find useful, and charging them for it. If you expect banners and popups to pay for your site, let alone your next meal, unless you're generating thousands and thousands of hits a day, you're going to be disappointed.
The web is not there to serve pop-ups. It does not exist solely for people to make money from. I run my sites out of love, and a desire to sharpen my skills. If you dislike it, or it's costing you too much, stop doing it. If you're going bankrupt, set up a donation system, and if people truly think your site is worthwhile, they'll dontate.
Example: a lot of web comics. They develop large followings, and then start to be run into a hole. Their fans take up the slack, because they don't want to see it die. A high traffic forum I participate in recently lost webhosting due to bandwidth and space concerns. The members of the forum pooled together some $1200 to buy a co-lo'ed server, and things are plugging along. They get nothing substantial out of it, but they enjoy it enough that they're willing to take a financial hit to keep it running.
If you have something people truly care about, they'll pay for it. If you have nothing but average, run-of-the-mill stuff that they can get elsewhere, they won't. It's as simple as that. Donations, subscriptions, etc. are the way to go, because if you're serving quality content, people will pay for it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used CB, and I have to say I like Phoenix better. CB just feels...off to me.
:D
And I love my integrated popup blocking.
</sarcasm>
Looks like PETA's gonna need a new advertisting campaign, "Holocaust On Your Network".
Well, of course not. The last administration saw fit to "share" our nuclear secrets with them. Heck, I'd be pretty jolly with the government if they were giving me specs for nuclear weapons, too.
Well, I know my girlfriend's parents bought TurboTax this year, and definitely used it. They also tend to be pretty concerned about digital privacy and such like this - I'm sure they'd be interested in getting it off their machine For one untrained in the ways of the boot track, how might I go about removing it? I've played with the MBR and such, and even had a virus infect my boot record before, but what's the proper method for removing this thing? Assembly? ;)
Do the virus scanners catch this? If so, can they restore an untouched copy of the boot track?
They'd have to have valid reply-to fields in order to receive bounces to prune their DB with, so I'd say no. A spammer isn't like a telemarketer - it doesn't take 30 seconds to find out that a number is bad. For a spammer, sending to a DB with only 10% valid addresses is trivial. CPU time and bandwidth are cheap, and as we've seen, they shrug off the consequenses of their bad DBs onto innocents.
I swear, if I ever meet a spammer, I'm using his CD tray and a pair of razor blades to castrate him. Fix the blades in place, drop and chop. The least we can do is prevent people like spammers from propagating their genes.
I'm the #1 Google hit for the tube is civilization. Woohoo! I get more hits from that phrase than any other, easily. :)
That's what I'm thinking. One little exec() call is just as dangerous as this thing. I wrote a "shell emulator" in PHP a while back that took a command from POST, exec'ed it, and returned the output to the user. It's not exactly as if this is anything fundamentally different. Yes, you can call system commands from the shell, people. Big deal. Years ago, I wrote a recursive file list/navigation tool that would let me navigate all the files in all the other webuser accounts on the machine. This is hardly a new problem.
App-level firewalls do this already, and do so quite nicely. Tiny Personal Firewall performs MD5s of any application that attempts net traffic, and will alert you if the MD5 changes, and block traffic until you approve the change. Quite useful, really.
Wanna bet?
I once wrote a phoenetic search engine for a site that took keywords and broke them down into their soundex phonemes, then stored those. Then, when a search was executed, it would convert the text words into phoenetic pieces and search the database for matches. It was quite accurate, actually. For example, one could search for "olif ghardin" and one of the returned results would be "olive garden".
I guess this is a similar idea. Pretty cool tech.
I have to wonder how much of that effect comes from "block spamming" where a spammer just mails alphanumeric combos in the hotmail domain. I've noticed from personal experience that shorter addresses tend to get spammed more quickly, and it only takes one well-coded image to flag your account as good.
Just a thought.
Nah...they were pre-crushing them for use in McDonalds' McFlurries.
I've been through the Eryxma route, too. I got the impression that they were kinda a 1- or 2-man shop, and there were some rumors on webhosting boards about them being less than legit. Nothing substantiated, but it was enough to make me shy away from them.
:)
I'm using phpwebhosting.com now, and couldn't be happier. They're a great solution if you can't afford Rachshack or whatever. The site in my sig is hosted with them, actually. Nice and fast, great support, geek-friendly, the works
You're not a game developer, are you? Probably not a really serious programmer, either. Heck, I'd be suprised if you're a coder at all, really.
Here's a hint: games aren't "hello world" apps. Their complexity and required level of interaction with hardware makes it extremely difficult to do something perfectly right the first time. In the case of a PC game, you have a program that is going to run on an incredibly diverse array of hardware configurations. With a console, this isn't an issue - you know what hardware you're programming for. Game developers, as a rule, do a damn fine job of releasing a game that performs well on most systems out there, then they patch it to accomodate for the systems that weren't handled in the lab. Game requirements continue to increase because hardware is developing further. Games get prettier and prettier. Example, UT2K3. Very high polygon counts, high-res textures, huge arenas, incredible physics system, gorgeous lighting, etc. You think all of that could be done on a p133? Hardly. That stuff takes CPU cycles, and lots of it.
The reason better hardware is required is because these games are designed around that hardware. Great looks are a big selling point for a lot of gamers (I know I'll get someone saying it's about gameplay, not graphics, but let's be honest: people will buy a pretty-looking game. I agree that gameplay is important, but graphics don't hurt.), and game devs are doing their best to make games look as good as possible. If you don't like the hardware requirements, go play with the original Quake engine. It's fast, and will run on most machines out there today with no problem, but good luck developing a game that wows anybody. Modern game standards require that kind of hardware.
Go try writing a game some time, then come back and whine about those lazy game devs.
What I really find amusing is that people will take the time to gripe about dupes. After all, those evil editors are taking our precious bandwidth by posting dupes, so we have to make sure we fight the power and complain about it! :P
:)
:D
Yeah, post complaints! Reload the page a few times! Damn the man!
I just find it amusing that we get an entire story of posts saying "dupe!" - as if one post wasn't enough. Nope, just in case I decide to start reading comments at the very freaking middle of the page, there will always be someone there to inform me that this story is, in fact, a dupe! I can't imagine what I would do without that valuable info! Thank you, all 400 of you, that felt the need to uniquely point out that I could have read the same article some 5 articles prior!
The above is not intended seriously, for the humor impaired.
Hell, I live in Phoenix, AZ. I'm going to complain, because people are always calling me up when they have computer problems, thinking I'm associated with Phoenix the BIOS manufacturer!
*sigh*
It's such a cool name, too. Heh.
er... s/software/hardware;
Oops.
It's not just a silly reference. It's a demonstration of the fact that an attack like that could have dire consequenses to the net, and at this point, there's not much we can do about it.
Now, if they'd said "Sept 11 caused people to run around screaming, tripping over datacenter cables and unplugging the net", then I would see your point, but as it stands, it's a valid example.
You hadn't heard? They were granted a patent on "a method of transferring copyrighted bits between two computers via a large scale electronic network" last week. It's such an innovation! After all, such innovators should be able to sue their way to the top, shouldn't they?
Yes, that was sarcasm, for the humor-impaired.
If advertisement works, go for it.
That said, don't expect it to work. Unless you're a site that does a huge volume of traffic, it's just not gonna work.
The trick is to get paid by doubleclick without pissing off the customers. Not an easy balancing act.
How would they check to see if you've got them downloaded? Parse the server logs on the fly? Don't think so.
:D
The problem with the 5-second thing is this: 5 seconds is more than enough for a browser to spawn a popup. Which spawns a popup. Which spawns a popup. Which...
Can you say "large memory footprint"?
Well, let's de-gray-ify it a bit.
Any legal site that is doing enough traffic to put a dent in the owner's wallet is obviously quite appreciated. People will pay to use it. The little small sites? Of course no one is going to pay. No one goes to them. However, they also cost almost zero to run. I can get free webspace at any of the bazillion providers out there to put up a page about my dog. If I want to do something dynamic, I can pay phpwebhosting.com $10/month for all the tools I need, and a dynamic website is probably going to generate a bit more traffic than your stadnard Frontpage hack job. If you actually have a job, $10/month isn't going to be a big problem. I'm a college student making $15/hr at my day job. In one 8-hour work day, I will have made enough money to run my site for a year, assuming bandwidth costs are negligible.
If it bothers you that people don't vigorously shake you hand for creating a site, then you need to reevaluate your approach to the web. Unless you manage to create the next Yahoo or something, people don't really care. Are they at fault for not sending you mail thanking you for your wonderful site? I'd hardly say so. Do strangers waking by your house stop by to say "Nice job on the lawn! That's really something! You must have put a lot of work into it!"? I've never experienced anything like that.
I have a girlfriend, a social life, school, a family of 5 other people to interact with, and I still manage to work 30 hours a week at the office and develop websites on the side. The "no time" is really not an issue. Take an notebook with you for a week, and write down everything you do with the times you spent doing it. At the end of the week, tally the gaps. I -guarantee- you there will be a lot. If my father, who works to provide for a family of six, maintains relationships with friends, practices and plays in the church band, and goes hiking for 4 hours every Saturday can find time to study for an MBA, then chances are most people can find extra time for the things they want to do, too.
If you want money from people, charge them for something. The idea that popups are the only way to make money on the web is faulty at best.
I said it before, I'll say it again.
:)
If people think your site's worthwhile, they will pay to support it. If no one likes it, they're not going to pay. Simple as that.
If no one likes your site, you're probably just polluting, anyway
With sites such as warez and serialz sites, I can see why popups would be so prevalent - they don't really have any other method of supporting their massive bandwidth needs, since they can't really resort to a customer-appreciation method - people that are downloading warez all day long probably don't want their subscription info in a personal database or anything, and they're obviously the kind of people that aren't going to pay for something if they don't absolutely have to. The less legal areas of the web use popups like none other. I see -no- reason for a legit site to use them.
On a completely different tack, I've thought of a way to make bunches of money, but can't implement it due to that pesky consciounce of mine. Spam that spawns dozens of popups. The ultimate in invasive advertising. Probably very lucrative, sadly.
Marketing execs are such pushovers. Just say 'on the internet" and they'll jump all over it.
A better solution is just to have code that tells the javascript in the page that the popup is active without actually opening it. That way, the browser -thinks- it opened a window, but it didn't. Not exactly rocket science. Of course, you could then get really tricky, such as setting a cookie via popup, or something like that, but you're just going to alienate a large audience that doesn't accept cookies anyway.
Anyway, back to my question though, how SHOULD people make money from their websites? Or should thousands of people in the world just work their butts off to give YOU stuff for free?
Anyone who has ever tried to produce something worthwhile, such as a website, in their spare time, in addition to having a full-time job, will probably understand these sentiments.
Note: reading my preview, this post sounds quite holier-than-thou - not intended at all. This isn't an attack, just the perceptions of a web developer. Now, on to the content!
I'm a pro web developer, and put up sites all over in my spare time just for the heck of it - not little pansy Frontpage sites, PHP/SQL sites that I've sunk a lot of time and effort into.
I have yet to ever put a single banner, popup, or paid button ad on any site of mine. Honestly, $10 or $12/month is quite negligible, and it gives you a presence on the web. If you don't like it, then get off. The way to make money on the web is ot through advertising, but by offering a service that people find useful, and charging them for it. If you expect banners and popups to pay for your site, let alone your next meal, unless you're generating thousands and thousands of hits a day, you're going to be disappointed.
The web is not there to serve pop-ups. It does not exist solely for people to make money from. I run my sites out of love, and a desire to sharpen my skills. If you dislike it, or it's costing you too much, stop doing it. If you're going bankrupt, set up a donation system, and if people truly think your site is worthwhile, they'll dontate.
Example: a lot of web comics. They develop large followings, and then start to be run into a hole. Their fans take up the slack, because they don't want to see it die. A high traffic forum I participate in recently lost webhosting due to bandwidth and space concerns. The members of the forum pooled together some $1200 to buy a co-lo'ed server, and things are plugging along. They get nothing substantial out of it, but they enjoy it enough that they're willing to take a financial hit to keep it running.
If you have something people truly care about, they'll pay for it. If you have nothing but average, run-of-the-mill stuff that they can get elsewhere, they won't. It's as simple as that. Donations, subscriptions, etc. are the way to go, because if you're serving quality content, people will pay for it.