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Old April 27th, 2005
Un@#557686
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Feature: "undo" option for accidentally clicking "clear incomplete" or "stop" and the like.

Bug fix: downloads from people using current version of Limewire sometimes stall -- the download slows down, then stops at 0 kb/s; usually without even getting one more percentage point between beginning to slow down and stopping. Why does Limewire do this? I assume my own copy does this to people downloading from me as well, and I'd much rather it didn't.

Bug fix: Limewire (some versions) seems to "play possum" sometimes. When this occurs, it occurs consistently with specific hosts, and it occurs when that host has a large number of files one wants and one downloads five of them. All the rest fail and the host is apparently offline, but it will seem to come online again later and you can get exactly 5 files before it disappears again. This can't be coincidence, so it's not really going offline; merely pretending to. (Shareaza is also notorious for playing possum, and indeed, it's much worse than LW for it; but there's nothing LW's developers can do about Shareaza. They can do plenty about Limewire though.)

Bug fix: "browse host" isn't always greyed for unbrowseable hosts, resulting in an error message.

Bug fix: "chat with host" still isn't always greyed for unchattable hosts.

Bug fix: Chat failure doesn't produce an error message, and chat success doesn't always produce a window right away. The window also sometimes appears behind other windows, and goes unnoticed for ages. As a result, there is no immediate feedback and sometimes no feedback at all as a result of a chat attempt.

Bug fix: I still get a high percentage of corrupt files that don't actually get detected as corrupt by Limewire, but only when I attempt to use the file and find that it's damaged, truncated, or has been substituted with something else entirely by whatever host sent the file. The percentage can be made nearly zero with intelligent hashing, and with hashes included in search results, rather than depending on the host sending the file to be honest about the hash. Hosts substituting a different file currently substitute a different hash as well, and Limewire doesn't notice anything is amiss and that the file you're downloading isn't the one the search result was supposed to produce.

Feature/bug fix: "block host" on a grouped search result should block all of the hosts that returned the bogus result. This would make it so I could actually add all of the iPod spammer's myriad IP addresses to the list before the year 2300, rather than after. (How many does that company have, anyway? I expect a commercial entity to have a single netblock, or a handful, and static IPs; this one seems to have over three dozen -- the iPod spammer has hosts in 4.*, 12.*, 18.*, 24.*, 59.*, 60.*, 61.*, 62.*, 63.*, 64.*, 65.*,66.*, 67.*, 68.*, 69.*, 70.*, 71.*, 80.*, 81.*, 82.*, 83.*, 84.*, 128.*, 130.*, 131.*, 133.*, 134.*, 136.*, 138.*, 139.*, 141.*, 142.*, 144.*, 149.*, 150.*, 151.*, 152.*, 154.*, 155.*, 156.*, 162.*, 163.*, 165.*, 166.*, 168.*, 172.*, 192.*, 195.*, 198.*, 200.*, 201.*, 202.*, 203.*, 204.*, 205.*, 206.*, 207.*, 208.*, 209.*, 211.*, 212.*, 213.*, 216.*, 217.*, 218.*, 219.*, and 220.*. This kind of diversity is amazing -- it suggests that rather than buy a net block, the corporation responsible has set up lots of small servers in widely varying geographic areas, each with its own internet service provider. That's a lot of sites as well as a lot of physical computers and a lot of separate network accounts. Expensive. I thought spamming was not a viable business model unless you could keep expenses to nearly zero, because of the very low click-through rate? How long before this joker goes out of business at the rate he must be burning cash just to keep up with all the bills? I mean, assuming each site has a cheap dialup connection, and that there's only one site for each top-level IP block he uses, that's 67 separate ISPs (count the IP blocks above!) times twenty bucks a month is ... a couple thousand bucks a month, or about $25000/year. Assuming the company responsible has only one employee per site with a $25000/year salary, that's $25000x68 or almost 2 million dollars a year expenses. If there's fewer employees, then the travel costs for whoever has to jump around from site to site (and the IPs indicate they're widely dispersed geographically) will more than make up for the savings in salaries. How does any spammer make $2 million plus a year? I don't see how, unless the spamming operation is a sideline on some other business that already has sites and internet servers in a huge variety of locations, so that the machines, network connections, and on-site staff are sunk costs from the point of view of the spamming operation. That suggests that it's a big company, which makes me wonder, given what it's pushing, whether it's Apple. But they couldn't survive the bad PR if they got caught, surely? The only other possibility is if the spamming is coming from a virus, but a virus has a short lifetime before everyone's up to date and it gets eradicated, and this has been going on for a year or more.
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