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Grex > Oldcoop > #360: Member initative: Allow members to host images | |
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| Author |
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| 25 new of 182 responses total. |
cross
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response 50 of 182:
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Sep 14 11:40 UTC 2006 |
What percentage of users does that represent, and how many GB/month of
bandwidth would they use?
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steve
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response 51 of 182:
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Sep 14 16:49 UTC 2006 |
Since we try to stomp on people when they're caught doing that,
probably not too much. But in the last two months I've found two
repositories of jpgs that were renamed in an attempt to hide them,
each 200M+ in size. I find people who wget data and them FTP it
from Grex quite frequently. I know that there are people who
continue to use Grex as a waystation, and if they thought it
was OK to do it, things would ramp up. From conversations with
some reluctant folks caught doing this, I got statements that
getting pictures from Grex masked the site that they were getting
them from, trying to get around rules about not visiting porn
sites from company/university sites. For a while I thought the
practice was getting bettter (lesser) but I think its ramping
back up.
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cross
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response 52 of 182:
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Sep 14 17:28 UTC 2006 |
Perhaps. But then, with the small-ish disk quotas most users have, I'm not
sure they could upload much porn. I'm astonished that you found someone with
200MB of data, and I wonder how that happened....
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steve
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response 53 of 182:
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Sep 14 20:24 UTC 2006 |
It was on several accounts if I remember.
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cross
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response 54 of 182:
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Sep 14 21:31 UTC 2006 |
Someone is clearly motivated.
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scholar
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response 55 of 182:
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Sep 15 06:21 UTC 2006 |
Does Steve' have any proof of his allegations?
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steve
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response 56 of 182:
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Sep 15 11:40 UTC 2006 |
It's what we've been dealing with since we were on the net.
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steve
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response 57 of 182:
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Sep 15 11:49 UTC 2006 |
Using locate to find jpg, JPG, gif, GIF, png, PNG, pdf and PDF files
of those extensions, there are just under 10,000 of them. Note that
this does not include tar and zip files holding them.
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cross
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response 58 of 182:
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Sep 15 14:19 UTC 2006 |
Any idea how many gigabytes per month we would use if we allowed images?
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steve
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response 59 of 182:
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Sep 15 16:01 UTC 2006 |
Nope, and thats what I'm afraid of, a huge ramping up over a coulple
of months.
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cross
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response 60 of 182:
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Sep 15 17:50 UTC 2006 |
Other systems that allow personal web pages with images don't seem to have
this problem. What does mnet do?
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tod
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response 61 of 182:
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Sep 15 18:08 UTC 2006 |
M-Net allows images. It doesn't seem to be an issue.
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cross
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response 62 of 182:
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Sep 15 18:35 UTC 2006 |
Todd, as far as your are aware, are there any restrictions on size, etc?
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tod
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response 63 of 182:
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Sep 15 19:01 UTC 2006 |
I couldn't answer to that but I can say that I've not had any problems with
any images in my webpages there.
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steve
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response 64 of 182:
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Sep 15 19:43 UTC 2006 |
What does it matter what happens on other systems? We aren't talking
about other systems, we're talking about Grex. I *know* from personal
experience that a lot of people, an amazing number of people forn whatever
reason use Grex to get graphical files and then ship them elsewhere,
either by ftp or mail. I sent so many mails out at one point when I
was watching every day that I had a little scorecard where I counted
how many I was doing a day. I think the record was around 20 people in
a day.
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cross
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response 65 of 182:
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Sep 15 19:45 UTC 2006 |
You make it sound is if images are inherently bad. Yeah, you *know* that lots
of people try to put them on grex. I'm asking (a) whether that is bad, and
(b) if it is, why?
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steve
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response 66 of 182:
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Sep 15 19:54 UTC 2006 |
Sadly, a huge amount of the images I've seen people passing through
Grex are porn. Now, I don't have an objection to that itself--I say let
people do what they want. But when they use Grex resources in the
process of doing this, thats a problem. We have FAR more CPU and net
bandwith than we did before, but also fewer places on the net exist to
allow people to cover their tracks. I've had several people admit to
me that they were using Grex so as to not make an obvious impression
in FTP logs at their site just what was going on. On the heels of this
debate are other forms of audio/visual stuff like mp3's, mpgeg's and
PDFs.
Image files have the special problem of being a political item when
it comes to some kinds of porn, ala child pictures. We've had a few
cases of this that I know of, and hope we don't have more.
Looking from higher above this gets into what we want Grex to be.
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cross
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response 67 of 182:
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Sep 15 20:32 UTC 2006 |
Then how come other public access Unix systems don't have the same problems?
This is what I'm trying to get at.... We're not unique in the world.
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steve
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response 68 of 182:
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Sep 15 20:49 UTC 2006 |
I honestly don't know. I know that a lot of people come here to
try and break things, and that a lot of people come here because of
the freedoms we offer. Quite possibly the massive number of Indian
users we had a one point changed people's perceptions of Grex, in
terms of what could be done on it.
No Grex isn't unique, but look at the number of dwindling systems
like us. M-Net got rid of email. Most or all of the FreeNet systems
are gone. Nether.net still around, I think. But how many other places
are there like Grex now?
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cross
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response 69 of 182:
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Sep 15 21:12 UTC 2006 |
I don't know. But places that offer hosting space (some even free) for images
and the like are a dime a dozen. M-Net got rid of email due to the spam
problem, which affects everyone pretty much the same way. Besides, the number
of public-access Unix systems was never particularly large (though in an
ever-expanding set of computers connected to the Internet, the percentage of
computers like grex relative to the whole continues to shrink).
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cross
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response 70 of 182:
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Sep 15 21:13 UTC 2006 |
(But that brings up another point - in a world where the potential pool of
users who *want* to use a system like grex is shrinking relative to the whole,
it makes sense to offer services that would attrack users to the system.
Hosting images is something that people have long asked for. Other systems
do it successfully; we won't know if we can or not until we try, measure, and
respond to those measurements.)
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mcnally
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response 71 of 182:
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Sep 15 22:57 UTC 2006 |
re #67:
> Then how come other public access Unix systems don't have the same
> problems?
There are two types of problems here.
One sort is immediate and practical -- how much space will users use and
how much bandwidth will be consumed if we make this change.
The other sort is not immediate, but represents what is probably a fairly
low level of risk (much less than 10%, though how low is hard to guess)
but a substantially bad outcome -- entanglement in civil or criminal
penalties, possibly substantial ones, if Grex is found to be serving the
"wrong" kind of content and someone decides to make an example of us.
I can even see potential risk to some people who have been supporters of
Grex -- I hope such a thing would never happen but what if polygon were
running for election against an opponent who was saying things like "my
opponent serves on the board of a computer system that's known for hosting
child pornography"?
I explained earlier that I think there is a substantial risk to Grex if it
allows images but attempts to control the content of the images. I think
there is also a risk to Grex if it allows images but tries to maintain a
content-neutral image policy. And I think when you ask "why is this not a
problem for other public-access Unix systems" I don't think it's safe to
assume that in fact it ISN'T a problem for those systems. It may just be
that it's a problem they've decided to ignore in the hopes it never becomes
an issue.
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steve
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response 72 of 182:
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Sep 16 00:55 UTC 2006 |
Actually Dan, I think that there are a lot of people who think using
Grex will offer them anonymity. I think a lot of people have come here
for that.
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cross
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response 73 of 182:
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Sep 16 01:30 UTC 2006 |
Regarding #71; It is a risk. The question is, is it large enough of a risk
to be worth worrying about? Other systems don't think so, and perhaps we
should wonder why that is.
Regarding #72; The same is certainly true of M-Net, and yet it doesn't appear
to have been an issue for them yet.
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steve
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response 74 of 182:
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Sep 16 04:33 UTC 2006 |
As I've said before, so what. M-Net isn't Grex.
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