[Sparkle] Appfresh abuse

[Andy Matuschak]

Okay, jeez, 1tb/mo is kinda silly.

I know that Adium's disabled their iUseThis appcast feed thing, so you  
should be able to, too.

- Andy Matuschak

On May 23, 2008, at 10:37 AM, Charles D. H. Williams wrote:

> 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
>
>
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