« previous: Not Sick | next: Some Random Stuff »

Only You Can Prevent Bandwidth Theft

Not only is the site hideous, not only is it apparently written by a 22-going-on-13-year-old who just learned the F-word, not only is it infested with those irritating look-how-cool-I-am posed self-portraits, but the person is embedding a Reggie track from MY server as the background-sound for her little website. Not downloading the song and then uploading it to her myspace account, mind you -- heaven forbid she should actually do any WORK or use any of her OWN bandwidth for her background sounds -- oh no, she is PLAYING THE SONG FROM MY SERVER DIRECTLY.

Did I mention that I propose a mandatory test for any person wishing to publish anything, anywhere, on the internet? Oh yes, I do. I propose this test: if you are not an ignorant jerk, then you are allowed to put things on the internet. If you are an ignorant jerk, then instead of being allowed to post things on the internet, you get a kick in the face.

I think that’s reasonable.

Posted by Anthony on Jan 11, 2005 | 5 replies
Filed under: Audio, Internet, Music, Stupidity, Web Development

Comments:

01. Jan 12, 2005 at 10:00am by Mike:

If ignorant jerks were banned from the internet, I’d have to find another way to reinforce my perceived superiority over the bulk of humanity.

02. Jan 12, 2005 at 09:17pm by mom:

Can you have her arrested for theft? Or detach her from your server?

03. Jan 12, 2005 at 09:32pm by Anthony:

Heh... jerk? To moonbats maybe. Ignorant? No way. You opened my eyes to the wonderful world of 24; that alone is qualification enough.

Nah, I doubt I could have her arrested. But yes, I immediately wrote a few rules into my server’s configuration that prevent the song from playing on her site (or any other site from now on).

It’s not the file that she’s stealing; if she’d actually download the file from my site and then upload it to her own server, that’d be fine. But she’s streaming the file directly from my server, so every time someone visits her page, it makes a call to my server and transfers the entire song (she has it set as a background sound, so it plays for all her visitors whether they like it or not). So the problem is that my server (like most home servers) is on a severely slow uplink; just one person transferring that song will saturate my uplink completely, meaning 1) I can’t upload any other data except in tiny increments, and 2) I also can’t download at any decent speed, since every "download" also has to be uploading data to the remote computer that says "ok, I got that packet, send the next one."

That’s why it’s "bandwidth theft": she’s causing my server to do an extremely bandwidth-intensive task (transferring a multi-megabyte music file) but to the end-user it looks like it’s HER server -- it’s all just "her webpage" as far as any normal user can tell.

04. Jan 13, 2005 at 06:57pm by Mike:

<<Heh... jerk? To moonbats maybe. Ignorant? No way. You opened my eyes to the wonderful world of 24; that alone is qualification enough.>>

So you’re saying my superiority over humanity is not just a perception? OK, good. Just checking. [ SEINFELD MODE ] My mother was right. I AM special. Nobody thinks about people the way I do [/ SEINFELD MODE ]

05. Jan 14, 2005 at 01:29am by Anthony:

Heh. OK, I just realized that you were probably referring to the teeming masses as the ignorant jerks, and not to yourself. So... yeah. Anyway, let the perceived superiority continue :)

Reply to this message here:

[ Home – Create Post – Archives – Login – CMS by Encodable ]