And based on my own personal experience, even if you persevere and force them to acknowledge the problematic behaviour, they can turn around and say it's not a problem and working as intended.
For example, when using Azure Front Door, it's apparently absolutely not a problem that as yet un-cached file in their CDN downloads from their own Azure Blob storage have a maximum download speed of around 2MB (16Mb) per second:
Them:
> Hello Jonathan,
> I hope you are doing well!
> I sincerely apologize for the significant delay in our response, which was necessary to conduct further internal testing.
> After a comprehensive review, we have determined that the behavior you are experiencing is typical for this type of operation.
> This is primarily due to the connection not being entirely directly, as it must pass through Azure Front Door. This process also involves distributing the cache among point-of-presence (POP) servers, which inevitably impacts the > operation's speed. Let me provide you with documentation covering that matter:
Me:
> So to be clear, Azure Front Door maxes out at less than 2MB/s (16Mbit/s) for uncached items even when everything is on Microsoft’s own servers?
Them:
> Hello Jonathan,
> Thank you for getting back to me.
> These values may vary by region, but those particular ones apply for South Africa North.
I also tested this behaviour in US and EU regions (from an Azure VM requesting a file from Azure Blob storage in the same region as the VM but via Azure Front Door) and in EU it was also similarly limited while in the US it was only a tiny bit better.
We use Cloudflare now, cheaper, faster, configuration UI which isn't painfully slow. Not without their own recent incidents, but better than Azure Front Door 99.99% of the time.
He indisputably defrauded $8M from these companies by "tricking" them into giving it to him.
Whereas with pirating by downloading a song, the "damage" is completely hypothetical, it's not like the downloader got actual money from doing the download and it's far from certain they would have paid the normal fee if the piracy option was not available. It's unproveable that the publisher actually lost any money from the activity.
However, hosting a website offering piracy through listing of e.g. torrents where they make significant money from ad-revenue is clearly a case of you profiting off the work of others, but it's probably still a bit grey in terms of linking the harm to the rights holder.
What's an open and closed case though is any subscription service where the website charges users in some form which grants them access to media they don't have a license to distribute and to which they don't compensate the rights holder.
There's intent, deception, and damages so it's definitely fraud. This isn't a mundane matter of creatively using someone's API in a way they don't like. He came up with a scheme to extract money from them. The ToS is the contract governing payments in this case (IIUC).
It's the difference between violating a no skateboarding sign in front of a shopping mall versus a no trespassing sign at a military base. They're both "just signs", right?
Oh I don't deny what he did is most likely a ToS violation. And under those terms, he should probably be forced to pay back the money.
But I don't see how it's fraud in the criminal sense. That's just my judgement as a citizen, not a lawyer. All I see is the shopping mall shaping criminal law to its own benefit.
As for the military bases, yeah, stay away from those, kids.
The point is that it doesn't matter what you call the contract. You're thinking "oh that's just a sign" (ie ToS). Your error is that not all signs are equal. The 8 million dollars is the military base in this analogy. Being prosecuted for violating this ToS under these conditions is not interchangeable with others.
Fraud is just any time you intentionally deceive someone for material gain. Even without the ToS this would presumably still qualify as fraud. The ToS just makes it more straightforward to argue (IIUC, IANAL, etc).
A decent rule of thumb is that if your hack or neat trick results in money in your bank account that the other party wouldn't have paid out to you had they been aware of what was happening then you are almost certainly committing a felony of some sort.
I guess forging documents and selling you a house which I don't own shouldn't be an actual crime either? The patterns of behavior in both cases are functionally indistinguishable.
He essentially defrauded $8M from media streaming companies, if the ToS violation is the easiest path for the companies to have him quite rightfully convicted of what is indisputably criminal behaviour then I have zero qualms about that.
Does this behaviour open the door for ToS being abused? I have no legal expertise, but I would expect in cases like this that everyone would rationally come to the conclusion that the defendant's behaviour was wrong and unethical and the ToS just made it easy for the plaintiffs to point out to the court that they do in fact explicitly forbid such activities, making it an open and shut case.
From headlines I've seen of around ToS enforcement over the decades, courts don't seem to just view them the same as a physically signed legal agreement and will not enforce outrageous clauses in them.
The steaming services won't have lost any money on this.
It's the advertisers who paid for ads to get played to the bot accounts, and (depending on how the advertising deals were structured) other artists with legitimate listeners might have received smaller revenue cuts.
> rightfully convicted of what is indisputably criminal behaviour
Consider the opposite view: if pretending to be a human is "criminal behavior" there are about 8 billion criminals walking around on this planet.. and in this case our current legal system appears to be hijacked for the protection of utterly nonsensical, hopelessly broken, ancient business models from a rent-seeking, anti-consumer, creator-exploiting, trillion-dollar corporate mafia, which would like nothing better than to track, spy, and force-feed their audience at every turn.
Time for all players wasn’t the only issue with multiplayer when I tried a while back with Civ 4 and a couple of my brothers. We never even got to thinking it’s taking too long before a desync error would occur.
> meaning that code cannot have any visibility into deallocations.
This is more pedantry than a serious question. JavaScript has WeakReference, sure it'd be cumbersome and inefficient because you'd need to manually make and poll each thing you wanted to observe, but could it not be said that it does provide a view on deallocations?
Yes, WeakRef and FinalizationGroup both make GC visible (the latter removes the need to poll in your example). So not pedantic at all. They were eventually added after much reluctance from the language designers and implementers, partly because they can lead to code being broken by (valid & correct) engine optimizations, which is a big no-no on the web. But some things simply cannot be implemented without them.
Note that 90% of the uses for them actually shouldn't be using them, usually for subtle reasons. It's always a big cause for debate.
I briefly tried it when they first launched it, but in less than an hour decided I hated it.
Which I really should have anticipated since I generally dislike music radio "DJ"s too and Spotify's AI DJ is trying to be like one.
In particular it would do things like start playing tracks with no bearing on anything I'd ever listened to, like local South African music which is very far from universally preferred here. I also got the feeling it was pushing "promoted" tracks with little regard to what I would likely like, just like real life radio stations.
I also don't care to have some voice interrupting the music all the time.
I was hoping it would kind of be like their other "radio"s, but it would be more explorative to finding more "similar" tracks to what I have listened to, without seeming to get stuck in a repeating play list.
I suppose it's a cool gimmick for people who are prefer the broadcast radio experience.
These services shouldn't make assumptions based on demographics, like location. Some broader examples, it shouldn't recommend US pop music to me because I live in the US or country music because I live in the south.
This is easily solved in your source NAT configuration on pfSense. It's a single checkbox to not randomize ports on outbound flows. This will enable full cone NAT.
You can scope it to just your IPsec service, or whatever it is your hosting, or you can enable full cone for the whole subnet.
It is not DNAT, nor is it port forwarding. If you host a SIP proxy, SBC or peer to peer gaming, it will enable these use cases as well.
My favourite bad volume control was in Real Player around 1997 where changing the volume in the application actually changed the global volume of Windows.
I was so confused by the CD drives of that era. They all had a volume wheel and a headphone jack, but never once did I experience those working. The audio CDs were always “owned” by the OS, which piped the audio through the normal channels out my speakers or the PC headphone jack.
I imagine the existence of those means that CD drives had their own DAC and other logic. I guess there was an idea of wanting to play CD audio without it being a PC concern? Or on PCs without audio capability?
Almost all IDE and SCSI CD-ROM drives were indeed capable of playing audio CDs fully autonomously, with the host PC basically only sending them the command to start playing; many drives took it one step further and provided a play button in addition to the usual eject button, which worked even if the drive wasn't plugged at all into a machine. The audio was typically output both to the front panel headphone jack and to a 4-pin connector on the back of the drive, which you were supposed to connect to one of your sound card's aux inputs so that it would get mixed into the system audio output.
Unfortunately, a decent number of machines were not fitted with the relevant cable. Combined with the low-quality DACs that most drives used, the compatibility issues that plagued ATAPI implementations and the dramatic increase in CPU power and sound card quality throughout the mid-to-late 90s, this led media player software to quickly move on from drive based playback to so-called "digital audio extraction", where the CD is basically ripped in real time and streamed to your sound card's own DAC. Thus, unless you played older games that relied on hardware CD-DA playback [1], it's somewhat unlikely you ever experienced it under, say, Windows 98 or XP.
[1] As offloading playback to the drive had no CPU overhead, games often stored their music as additional tracks on the game disc and played it that way. Incidentally, basically all CD-ROM-based game consoles and arcade systems relied heavily on hardware accelerated playback as well, with some going even further and allowing for compressed (ADPCM) CD audio streaming with no CPU intervention.
Had a 3x NEC external scsi cd drive. It had play/ ff and rewind buttons and a little lcd that showed the track #. With the headphone jack it made a decent cd player.
They absolutely had a DAC. The earlier commercial CD-ROM drives used an internal audio cable connected to a dedicated input on the sound card pcb for cd-audio. It was years before audio players used digital audio streams.
When a computer crashed, cd audio continued to play. My PC just kept playing trough a hard reset/reboot, in fact. It would only stop playing when DOS booted far enough that it loaded mscdex, a step I could skip with a startup menu. I've always wondered why it managed to survive a reset pulse on the wire.
I almost didn't believe this, but I just tested and you're absolutely right.
I've never noticed because I use a Steel Series headset which presents as two output sound devices to Windows, the idea being that you can independently control the volume of your "game" and your "chat" application. Turns out it's useful for Teams as well.
I feel like that was super common. Apart from changing the volumes of entire channels (e.g. changing the level of Line In vs. digital sound), volume was a relatively “global” thing.
And I’m not sure if that was still the case in 1997, but most likely changing the volume of digital sound meant the CPU having to process the samples in realtime. Now on one hand, that’s probably dwarfed by what the CPU had to do for decompressing the video. On the other hand, if you’re already starved for CPU time…
I mentioned this in another thread now, but it was definitely noteworthy to me that it did this since I was used to other programs not doing so, for example Winamp, I would also have thought Windows' Media Player did not do this, but I can't remember for certain.
Winamp had a software equalizer with a preamp, which was noteworthy. Are you sure changing the volume did not mean changing the preamp level in Winamp?
If you turned off the preamp (could be directly done in the EQ window I think), what did the volume control actually do?
Maybe we're not understanding each other correctly here.
It's 30 years ago now, but my recollection is that Winamp did not change Windows' global volume.
I am less certain, but I thought Windows' own Media Player similarly also did not change Windows' global volume.
What I definitely recall correctly is being surprised that Real Player would change the Windows' global volume and this would not have been so noteworthy to me unless it was unusual compared to other applications I typically used.
No, I get you. I'm stating that Winamp might have been "special" because it had a software equalizer, and its volume control might have actually changed the preamp level. This would be fairly unusual for other app of its time, and I also wondered what would happen if you turned the Preamp off with its big shiny button, and whether that would let the volume control control the global volume instead, or whether it maybe would disable the volume control entirely.
What I'm saying is: I still feel (perhaps wrongly, quite possibly so) that in 1997, changing the global volume was more common, and that even being able to change app-specific volumes required some non-trivial features from the app who can do so.
That was a hardware/software thing as far as I remember. If it was using something like DirectSound it would adjust the audio independently. Other media players did the same thing.
It was definitely noteworthy that it did this since I was used to other programs not doing so, for example Winamp, I would also have thought Windows' Media Player did not do this, but I can't remember for certain.
For example, when using Azure Front Door, it's apparently absolutely not a problem that as yet un-cached file in their CDN downloads from their own Azure Blob storage have a maximum download speed of around 2MB (16Mb) per second:
Them:
> Hello Jonathan,
> I hope you are doing well!
> I sincerely apologize for the significant delay in our response, which was necessary to conduct further internal testing.
> After a comprehensive review, we have determined that the behavior you are experiencing is typical for this type of operation.
> This is primarily due to the connection not being entirely directly, as it must pass through Azure Front Door. This process also involves distributing the cache among point-of-presence (POP) servers, which inevitably impacts the > operation's speed. Let me provide you with documentation covering that matter:
Me:
> So to be clear, Azure Front Door maxes out at less than 2MB/s (16Mbit/s) for uncached items even when everything is on Microsoft’s own servers?
Them:
> Hello Jonathan,
> Thank you for getting back to me.
> These values may vary by region, but those particular ones apply for South Africa North.
I also tested this behaviour in US and EU regions (from an Azure VM requesting a file from Azure Blob storage in the same region as the VM but via Azure Front Door) and in EU it was also similarly limited while in the US it was only a tiny bit better.
We use Cloudflare now, cheaper, faster, configuration UI which isn't painfully slow. Not without their own recent incidents, but better than Azure Front Door 99.99% of the time.
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