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?'

It would have been a simple narrative if they'd been a plucky band of ideologically-sound scruffy hacker types running Linux boxes rescued from the skips behind merchant banks in some bender-housed eco-co-lo powered by vegetarian wind and the tears of orphaned seal pups. Well, simple narrative and tedious sentence construction. Then the various b0ings and Orlowski-antagonist fellow travellers would have been moderately justified in their 'sticking it to the man' handle-cranking.

I could kinda-sorta see scope for a future in a Howard Marks -style touring of the stations of the middle-class - Hay on Wye, Edinburgh and Cheltenham festivals - talking up a book for an audience who've no clue about the mechanics of the job, but who have their own oddly romantic ideas about it. However, it's Kimble, and I think he's too much of a bell-end to get away with something like that.

A technical audience would just want to hand out a shoeing. Partly because there ought to be some sanction for being an arrogant dickhead, partly for working out how to monetise a free FTP server. I mean, it's something everyone who's run servers for a while knows: people will deliver pr0n and war3z to your door if you give them even half a chance. It's like some batshit cargo-cult method of propitiating the spirits of the Internet.

I guess that's the question I have, though - what on earth did they do in order to end up with Pablo Escobar levels of cash lying about the place? I mean, was it some demented ball-pit of $100 bills or did they have a complicated machine to glue the things together so they were big enough for arse-wiping duty?

The other thing in my head is a half-formed ramble about Big Content buying their DVDs from the same shop that the polis get their drugs. You'll note that the news reports generally contain information that 'yea-many pills have been seized with a street value of dear-lord-how-much', which always used to make a chap shake his head in wonder when he did the maths.

It will also be interesting to see if the tiresome buggers report a similar rise in revenue in yea-many quarters time. I'll not be holding my breath though.

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.

I'm not sure what other fiddling ISPs actually do with torrent traffic aside from throttling and nasty stuff with RSTs.

You sure you're not thinking of CDN architectures? Big old boxes that colocate with the ISP so big-content dude can get your stuff to you fast with low transit bills?
The last time I looked, it transpired that you could buy mongo-fuck-off boxes of disk that were torrent proxy/accelerators for ISPs.

The clickhost guys don't do that, they just buy big big warehouses of computers somewhere and do some magic stuff with DNS to load balance.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

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.)

[steer.livejournal.com]

It may have been vapourware, or a bright idea that turned out to be a waste of money when bandwidth got cheaper somewhere else.

There are many many cool things proposed to help bittorrent... locality is the usual suggestion -- bittorrent does not destroy internet if traffic remains within ISP network and you connect next door rather than to new zealand. Best research I ever saw was some guys who hacked the DHT controlling the swarm to block some requests and send in others and ended up optimising it by stealth. Some users worked out something weird was going on "hey, how come all my peers are local not from miles away" but they weren't properly spotted until it was cached.

Glasnost are the people to check re bittorrent shaping. It seems virgin do, yes!

http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/results/#detection

Ah... the office across are big into QoS and QoE -- QoE meaning "what can we ditch that the user doesn't notice" -- vital for streaming stuff.

The whole cable-laying side of things is seriously crazy... though not so much these days I guess. In the more "boom" years about 2001 we got to chat to a guy who worked for some big optic cabling company who cabled up half the world (and I think went bust) they ended up with weird assets like a small fleet of cable laying craft. (I seem to remember they tried to help with the Kursk -- somehow I have it in my head that they owned submarines but that can't be right).

Ah... Global Crossing... that's it. Seems they somehow survived and got bought out.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Oh. Do you have doc or weblog about this sort of thing? I are out of touch these days.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I really ought to start doing such things but I patch together my knowledge as I come across it. Problem is that even when you research the interwebs full time it's still a fast moving target.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.

[adamw]

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 the media. As it notes, the fact that the "pirates" are making a better job of content distribution than the industry itself is a sad indictment of the whole situation, and frankly until this/if this ever changes, we'll be seeing this argument regularly for a long time yet.

[badnewswade.livejournal.com]

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.