[Sparkle] Appfresh abuse

[Charles D. H. Williams]

Andy Matuschak wrote:
> Sorry you've been having trouble, Charles. I'm really surprised to hear
it's been costing you so
> much—I've always thought bandwidth was so cheap! Do you think you could
share some gb
> estimates to help us understand what kind of numbers you're talking 
> about?

Bandwidth is a major worry but is not the only problem. There is the 
fact
that if I wish to collect demographic statistics I won't be able to and
the fact that AppFresh is using what I consider to be a form of
hot-linking in contravention of my explicit request to its developer not
to. I consider that to be at best impolite, and at worst a tort.

People tell me that bandwidth is 'cheap'. It is not if you want to 
distribute
freeware that is not open source. Almost all cheap ad-free hosting
services have terms of service that forbid you from using them to
distribute binary files. Until AppFresh came along I have been been
ticking along at between 20GB and 30GB per month of BW. Roughly 1GB
webpages and the rest downloads. This represents legitimate usage by
roughly 2000 active users that I am happy to foot the bill for.

A snapshot of my logs over the last day reveals that for every
'legitimate' Sparkle enquiry I am currently getting roughly twenty
AppFresh ones and this ratio is rising quite rapidly. I estimate (based 
on
historical downloads and ip numbers) that there are upwards of 50,000
dormant installations on people's Macs (mainly students to judge from 
the
times of year that downloads peak.)

MacSpice is not particularly popular and I am quite happy for it to stay
that way. The updates are just 3MB each but can come out every few days
during active periods (which is why I limit Sparkle to checking once per
week) yet thanks to pointless demand stoked by AppFresh it looks like it
could soon be requiring 1TB/month server to publish it.

This is a potential issue for anybody publishing free software.

Charles