Blog archives for July, 2004

Cheapest cars to own and repair

MSN MoneyCentral looks into the total cost of owing a vehicle, trying to figure out how much one spends on the car in the long run (repairs and maintenance). They have the tables for the cheapest and the most expensive car to own, the costliest models in terms of what you pay for collision insurance, as well as the cars that suffer more than average damage on a fender bender.

Business Week on MSFT fall

Business Week analyzes why Microsoft stock got punished lately by the investors after the Q2 results came in. “Because the market sees something different from the upbeat picture CEO Steve Ballmer painted on the day of the dividend announcement. It recognizes that Microsoft faces increasing competition in both PC operating systems and in desktop applications, the software giant’s key product areas. And it’s watching Microsoft’s difficulties repeating in new global markets the dominance it has gained in America”, Business Week says. Their solution? The company should develop a range of its popular desktop products for Linux operating system, starting with Office port for Linux.

Commoditization of software

The AlwaysOn 2004 broadcasts are up and July 15th 11:15 am - 12:15 pm panel on commoditization of software is really interesting. Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO of Sun Microsystems, Marten Mickos, the CEO of MySQL, Roman Stanek, founder of Systinet, Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite and Rod Smith from IBM discuss the current problems of the software world: commoditization of software, what constitutes commodity, making money in the open source world. Windows Media and Real videocasts are available.

Real Movies review

Associated Press reviews Starz! Movies on Real, also known as movies.real.com. I’ve signed up for the service few days after I caught the Slashdot story, since the service seemed to pretty interesting, and $12.95 (I live in Washington State, so add 8% to that) seemed like a very reasonable price for a monthly subscription.

Here’s the way it works - you have to download the latest Real Player and sign up for 14-day trial, providing your credit card right away, and they will start changing you the monthly fee as soon as the trial is over. At any given point there are exactly 100 movies available on Real Movies, and each week on Monday morning 25 leave and 25 arrive. It’s never a surprise since they make it pretty clear on both the Web site and inside the Real Player when the movie is going to expire.

You download the movie first and generally we’re talking about 600-700 MB files. The movies are single files in RMS format (Real Media Secure) and you can burn them to a CD, move them around the network, give away as gifts and what not. The catch? You must be signed in with your username and password on Real Player if you want to view the movie. You’re allowed a maximum of 3 computers, on which you can perform the sign-ins.

Once the movie is downloaded, you can view it 3 times. For the 4th time apparently you have to go to Real Web site and tell them what’s happening, as they want to make sure you’re not running a commercial cinema on their $13 a month. They call it “requesting additional licenses”. Theoretically you could just rewind the movie when the credits start at the end, but I’ve never tried it, and frankly, it’s not worth it - if you like the flick that much, buy it on DVD.

The selection is okay, nothing to wow about, but it’s also not some out-of-date or amateurish crap that other sites offer. The general principle, as I understand it, is that they publish movies that already came out on DVD. They don’t run anything that’s still in the cinemas, and nothing that just came out on DVD last week or so, in order not to compete with those sales, I assume.

What I do is generally download on my laptop, the watch it by attaching the laptop to the TV (via S-Video) and 5.1 speaker system. The quality is pretty good, it’s what you’d expect from a rental VHS tape, but it’s not DVD quality, which comes as no surprise with 600-700 MB compressed Real Video file. The Real Player itself, or Nagware Central, as it was known before, is actually pretty good, running quietly and with no ads, occasionally informing you that an expired movie that you forgot to delete, has been deleted for you.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to properly access the Real Movies site through the browser - for log on and downloading you must start within Real Player itself. Few drawbacks that I found: sometimes the movie is too quiet and requires bumping up the volume on both the computer and speaker system to higher than usual rate to properly hear the actors talk, sometimes the download stops for no apparent reason, and you have to click Restart, and sometimes Real Movies site checks your bandwidth and kicks you out for having too little of it (bandwidth, that is). The latter is pretty dumb, as I am sitting on my 3MB (supposedly) Comcast cable downlink, but I run a couple of torrents and FTP uploads in the background, and the nastyware on Real Movies site cuts me off, telling me I am not fast enough. It’s download, people, not streaming. Why do you care if it will take me 6 hours to download? I know that my FTP upload will finish running in the next 2 minutes, and you don’t. So why are you telling me how things should be done?

That’s about it. Overall, if you’re into watching movies, the price is good and beats rentals after about 3rd movie, although the selection of just 100 is definitely limiting.

Slashdot’s best: defrauding advertising clicks

A poster with a cute name AssFace posted the following on Slashdot. The discussion relates to the recent article on News.com on Google battling with the click-through fraud. I am getting a bunch of 503 error messages off Slashdot.org right now, so figured out I’d save a local copy for myself, as the technology described is quite interesting for anyone involved in Web programming.

[AssFace replies to a comment, suggesting automating the process would be far easier than hiring cheap labor]

With Google it is not as easy as some other companies out there.

Google’s code is placed on the site as a javascript include that then gets rendered to the screen at runtime when a browser executes it.
That means if you have a script hit the page and get the source for it, all you get is the javascript include.

If you write a page that onClick let’s you view the content of the Google IFrame (the Javascript include dumps out an Iframe that then fills with a page off of Google), you will then see more of the code.
They have several layers of javascript and none of the pages render out links directly, so it is hard to scrape them with a bot, since a bot only sees the source.

You could load up the pages individually (outside of the iframe) and take a look at them, but it doesn’t always work and also when you load that page, it sends back a reference to Google of what the site/location/name of the page you are loading looks like.
So if you have a site ballsweat.com that has Google Ads on it so that you can look to see what the ads look like, as you start messing around with it to get a better idea, they will see that it is no longer showing up on the site and instead showing up on your hard drive (or if you like you can put it on your server and then they can read your code that you are using).

That alone will tip them that you are looking into it - but then you could claim that it was someone else and not you (assuming it was on a drive), but then that could also mean that you just use someone else’s site to test.

So anyway, back to getting the data, you would have to load up the source, and then either parse the javascript and execute it to build it the same way a browser does (hopefully there are objects in Windows that let you simulate this and then dump the post rendered contents into a variable which you can scan - don’t know about that),.
OCR is out of the question since that is not going to get you the proper link (the links are listed, but the payment only goes out if you click on the link which first routes it through a Google site so it can register the click and track the stats and then redirects you to the site). When you mouseover it shows the regular site link, but that is done via javascript.

Then you run the issue that Google would have to be retarded to just let a single IP crunch through a ton of ads everyday.
So then you have to worry about spoofing - in this case it could arguably be blind spoofing - but the problem there isn’t that you want to load web pages - that would actually work with blind spoofing (say I am computer A, and I want to tell server B that computer C is connecting to it, and that it should send the page data there), but the problem is again that it is only going to send raw HTML/javascript source down that connection and it is them going to drop off of that machine.
So the site (Google in this case since you loaded a page and then “clicked” a link) registers the hit, but the page never gets rendered, so the Google page is never displayed and the redirect never happens - one could assume that Google is aware of this and wouldn’t count that as a hit since the other page never gets loaded.

So even if you could past all of that (heh, feels like shades of Oceans 11), then there is the issue that Google (technically it isn’t Google, but a series of companies that they farm out the AdWords content - learned that from an investment bank friend that sat in on the IPO workings - yay) monitors this shit and looks for anomalies.
So while you were getting 200 hits a 2 clicks every day for a month, if you all of the sudden are getting 2000 hits and day and 200 clicks, they are going to investigate your site.
If nothing has changed to show that there should be new interest in your site (new ad placement, new content, etc) and they can do searches and see that there aren’t any new sites pointing to you - then all signs point to you cheating.

And then on top of all of that, we can show that a Gaussian distribution is mathematically inappropriate in this instance and something more along the lines of the same Brownian motion entropy watch that is done on stocks (which also involve humans moving in and out of interest of an item) would be more appropriate with the scale distorted to take into account the lack of the negative side and also scaling necessities (essentially taking into account that huge spikes on sites with no changes in traffic can only go so high before looking bad - and that “so high” is not so great).

All of that said, if you could pull all of that off, then you would be able to slowly increase the fake traffic/hits on your site so that you could make more money - but you would want to be very careful about the content on there first.

On top of all of that, I think it should be fairly clear that I have thought about all of this before, I would argue that there are other pay-per-click sites out there that make it much easier to exploit.
Also, this approach is the wrong way of going about it and I could list a few other ways that are technically better and safer, or others that are riskier but would generate more money and distribute the initial source of fault away from yourself - but hey - I won’t! heh.
Since they actually work, I don’t want to be the one responsible for starting some new scam via public posting of the workings.

Morally I debated trying to do it, but the forces of awesome have won out so far.
Also, I would love a job at Google and I don’t suspect that hacking their system is going to win me too many favors.

Brad Silverberg on Microsoft vs. open-source

Brad Silverberg, former chief of Microsoft Windows division, who left the company in 1999, is being interviewed by the Milestone Group on Microsoft specifically and software venture capital world in general (Silverberg is currently working as managing partner for Ignition Partners). He provides an interesting viewpoint on Microsoft’s understanding of open source:

I don’t think they have figured that out yet, I think that is clear. They are struggling with not so much open source, per se, but rather they are no longer the low price solution. In the past Microsoft was the low cost solution and Microsoft was then competing and attacking expensive proprietary systems from below. Now for the first time the tables are turned and it’s Microsoft that’s being attacked from below by a lower price solution. Microsoft needs to figure out how it can demonstrate better TCO to justify its higher prices. Another aspect to that, which is an area I think Microsoft is also struggling with, which is when you are as successful and dominant as they are, how do you continue to foster that ecosystem? What really propelled Microsoft Windows success was an ecosystem that they created that allowed other people to benefit from your success. Actually your success was really a side effect or byproduct of their own success.

WordPress meetups

There are WordPress meetups organized round United States (they ask you for your zipcode). This site is run on Movable Type, but my other project is hardcore-WordPress (I think I went live with 0.98), and I’ve been just lazy enough to migrate the entire thing to WordPress (oh, that, and the fact that it doesn’t support multiple blogs off a single install yet).

1.3 promises a bunch of different features, none of which I find specifically useful (I always wanted an integrated RSS reader, and the ones I’ve written are all Perl-based, and the one here is an MT plugin), but the ones that are coming up look promising.