Your bi-annual current affairs post

[hirez]

I haven't looked too hard at the online meejah hoopla over the Megaupload business, but my instant reaction was 'Oh fuck it's Kimble again' followed by 'They really were taking the piss, weren't they

Comments

[steer]

Heh... I don't think you've quite grasped the scale of the clickhosts here. This isn't a batshit cargo cult -- these things are coming to be a dominant traffic source -- no joke. rapidshare, megaupload and the like are actually getting up there with torrents for their traffic share. (Torrent traffic is up a a number but down as a share is down because everything is moving to streaming video right now).

Almost by stealth these things are a massive part of the network right now.

Sure, they know it's mostly warez, pr0n etc... (Although these days why anyone would get their pr0n like that is confusing). Weird though how it's almost in "stealth" that they got there -- I mean everyone who's a geek knows about torrents, magnets, streaming as sources of traffic. Probably if you know a bit you know about CDNs and the like. But most people are only vaguely aware of this ecosystem and it's huge. I'm supposed to know this stuff and I can't name more than three without looking.

[hirez]

Oh, I'm not surprised at the scale. It's the functional equivalent of the Big Yellow hangars that live at the edge of every medium-sized town.

(Hell, we were driving up through northen Wisconsin, which is empty apart from pine trees and lakes, the other year. I'd not seen a building that wasn't straight out of the Rural Ruin community here for a half hour, yet there was a clearing with an access-road and a self-storage facility at the end of it. Barking.)

The last time I looked, it transpired that you could buy mongo-fuck-off boxes of disk that were torrent proxy/accelerators for ISPs. It is all about Somewhere For Your Stuff.

(Business plan: buy up one of those Big Yellow places. Fill it with cheap disks. Profit!)

[steer]

Oh yeah -- just found the reference I was looking for -- rapidshare generates more traffic than youtube. I think that's bloody amazing really.

The last time I looked, it transpired that you could buy mongo-fuck-off boxes of disk that were torrent proxy/accelerators for ISPs.Not sure what you're talking of here -- ISPs can jiggle around with where torrents get stuff from but I don't think it's much used in the wild -- going through standardisation stuff right now. ALTO/P4P -- the idea is the ISP says "don't get your torrent from that client there, get it from this one here, he's dead fast" and you do so, and hence ISP saves money from international transit costs and client gets faster traffic. However, ISPs do not (AFAIK) do this yet

[hirez]

It was a while ago, when bittorrent was going to destroy the internet. It may have been vapourware, or a bright idea that turned out to be a waste of money when bandwidth got cheaper somewhere else.

In the other window I am reading up about what's new with QoS. I've not paid attention to that since 1998. I am assuming that the likes of Virgin traffic-shape like bastards.

CDNs are a bit different, since you've to optimise yr site a little to reference the C that's being Ded by the N. (Yes I know there are various magic Nginx proxy/cache tricks too)

Tangentially, there was a quite head-warping article referenced in BLDGBLOG.. Ha! Here we are: http://www.information-age.com/channels/comms-and-networking/company-analysis/1660458/mining-dark-fibre.thtml (Making HFT go more better by finding redundant fibre runs and exploiting the speed of light. Yes I am going to use this in a story.)

[quercus]

What's "warez"?

I mean, Potatoshop, AutoCAD (Ding Dong!) and that's your lot for the intersection of software with a pricetag and a market. No one needs mongo-quid's worth of PLC Designer 4.0 (Persian language edition, no nasty viruses, honest). Angry Birds is 30 seconds to downnload and tuppence to pay for. Given the stupendous "I can't even read the index" volume of what's out there for free legitimately, is there really anything left in the buckshee department.

[hirez]

I come from the eighties; 'pr0n & war3z' is one of those phrases where the words sit together well. And, really, I HAFC what Joe & Jo Botnet-Windowsbox get up to on their toolbared-up Shonkomat-7 computers. I'm so out of touch I don't even 'follow' 'stephen fry'.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/why-the-feds-smashed-megaupload.ars is good stuff, though.

[asw909]

While the demise of Megaupload is largely a good thing, there are a few ironies in all of this.

- I get a lot of music promos digitally nowadays, and the better organised labels have their own promo pools squirrelled away on their secure websites somewhere, via username/password access. However the smaller labels that don't have access to this...use these hosting sites. They are cheap and a useful means of distribution for them (and saves them having to have expensive hosting deals).
- I have not seen anywhere someone calling out the media/content industry on the bullshit of their figures. On the BBC story [source], "Federal prosecutors have accused it of costing copyright holders more than $500m (£320m) in lost revenue". Where did they get this figure from? And how many of the people that downloaded this stuff would really have bought the stuff instead?

This is what worries me. The rather marvellous Downfall parody this week was the best explanation of what is going on, and a good skewering of some of the bullshit making it into

[badnewswade]

Weird... I never used MegaUpload for anything nefarious beyond maybe a couple of ROMs you couldnt' get anywhere else and that nobody cared about anyway. All I saw was content-distribution for people who didn't know how to work FTP... very good service, too.

Personally I think Schmitz is OK, if old fashioned and a bit of a poseur. Agree he wouldn't go down well with the lentil-scoffers; his buccaneering image would play well in front of a "libertarian" crowd if said "libertarians" weren't busy sticking their noses up the bottoms of big business. Like I say, the guy's main crime is that he's out of fashion. And 20 years for running an internet service that can be used for piracy is insane, oppressive on its face and a sure sign that the entire system has lost the plot. Reminds me of hearing about when the Soviets used to bust people hard for selling a few records and flared jeans on the street. Sure, it's naughty - but it's not like he killed anyone.