2006-09-10
A thought on iTunes and similar online services
What iTunes and similar online services are really selling is convenience and guilt-avoidance, with a small side order of helping out the artists. They're manifestly not selling the music itself (or videos or etc), since you can find them online yourself if you look hard enough.
The 'helping out the artists' bit is currently only a small side order because most everyone understands at some level how little of the money involved actually makes it to the artists.
The guilt-avoidance is not a good long term thing to base your business on, because there's an increasing amount of evidence that the current generation of teenagers feels very little guilt about this stuff to start with. (Partly, I like to suspect, because very few people feel very much guilt about not giving money to visibly rapacious record companies.)
On a legal front, the highest payoff is from closing down non-authorized services that make it convenient to find this stuff on the Internet, because they are your primary competition in the long term.
(Not only is suing individual downloaders time-consuming for a low payoff, but young people famously feel that they're immortal and that the odds don't apply to them, hence I think it has a low deterrent value.)
Odious DRM is thus cold-bloodedly counterproductive because it reduces the convenience factor.
(And iTunes et al can be viewed as a grand experiment in how much pain consumers will put up with before you drive them into the arms of more obscure, non-authorized sources. The early music company online music store attempts have already given us some data points.)
Weekly spam summary on September 9th, 2006
This week, we:
- got 15,100 messages from 230 different IP addresses.
- handled 18,312 sessions from 982 different IP addresses.
- received 156,592 connections from at least 49,202 different IP addresses.
- hit a highwater of 36 connections being checked at once, set on Saturday (today).
Message volume is up from last week, but I'm not too surprised; this is the start of classes and thus the time when all sorts of things come out of the woodwork and need to be emailed about. The per-day breakdown:
Day | Connections | different IPs |
Sunday | 20,556 | +7,236 |
Monday | 24,913 | +8,452 |
Tuesday | 24,521 | +7,693 |
Wednesday | 25,250 | +7,693 |
Thursday | 22,355 | +6,929 |
Friday | 21,720 | +6,690 |
Saturday | 17,277 | +4,509 |
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the whatever-it-is traffic didn't take Labour Day off.
Kernel level packet filtering top ten:
Host/Mask Packets Bytes 213.4.149.12 18567 965K 193.70.192.0/24 11572 522K 218.0.0.0/11 4542 221K 61.128.0.0/10 3442 173K 209.94.172.156 2723 145K 195.39.69.48 2670 160K 200.254.87.131 2669 128K 63.204.205.50 2008 120K 221.6.101.22 1972 118K 212.175.13.129 1957 117K
Overall volume is both up (at the high end) and down (at the low end) from last week.
- 213.4.149.12 and 212.175.13.129 both return from last week,
still with bad
HELO
greetings. - 209.94.172.156 kept trying to send spam after tripping our traps.
- 195.39.69.48 returns from August, blocked due to having no reverse DNS.
- 200.254.87.131 and 221.6.101.22 also have no reverse DNS.
- 63.204.205.50 is a
frys.com
machine. Although I suspect that it is trying to send us a backscatter bounce, it got blocked due to the behavior exhibited here.
Connection time rejection stats:
33545 total 16606 dynamic IP 13517 bad or no reverse DNS 2131 class bl-cbl 249 class bl-njabl 185 class bl-sbl 166 class bl-dsbl 131 class bl-sdul 75 class bl-ordb 46 class bl-spews
I have more or less given up peering into my crystal ball about the week to week connection time rejection stats unless something big changes. (Ironically, I missed the big change last week, which was the jump in the SBL's rejection rate to just behind the CBL.)
Seven of the top 30 most rejected IP addresses were rejected 100 times or more, with the champion being 200.254.87.131 (215 times), with 87.6.134.240 (210 times, an Interbusiness IP address that is also on the CBL et al).
22 of the top 30 most rejected IP addresses are currently in the
CBL, 8 are currently in bl.spamcop.net
, and 2 are currently in
the SBL; both are 'Cutting Edge Media' IP addresses. Apparently
those people just don't give up.
Hotmail stats this week are a bit better than last week, but worse on a personal level:
- 2 messages accepted, both spam sent to me.
- No messages rejected because they came from non-Hotmail email addresses.
- 21 messages sent to our spamtraps.
- 2 messages refused because their sender addresses had already hit our spamtraps.
- No messages refused due to their origin IP address
And the final numbers:
what | # this week | (distinct IPs) | # last week | (distinct IPs) |
Bad HELO s |
593 | 80 | 2258 | 140 |
Bad bounces | 101 | 91 | 263 | 233 |
Apart from the welcome reduction in these numbers, this week is pretty much the same as last week. The bad bounces did see the return of one of the 38-character hex digit login names as a destination, which makes me obscurely happy, much like Ursula Vernon spotting a botfly-infected squirrel.