Hot Gasoline

In St. Louis local news, there’s a brouhaha over ‘hot gas’ — how the gasoline companies have conspired to gouge us at the pump because they don’t take into account the current temperature of the gasoline being pumped.

Stories like this come up at lot, at least in St. Louis, thanks to the ‘investigative reporting’ (read: badly-informed muckraking) of NBC 5’s I-Team and Fox 2’s You Paid For It. These stories are always a mixture of baseless accusations, impassioned posturing, and men in suits trying to get back to their jobs.

“We tried to talk to alderman Joe Smith by showing up to a scheduled board meeting with a camera crew and lights and shoving a microphone in his face, instead of scheduling a meeting with him and agreeing on a time to interview him. He refused to talk to us and threw us out of the meeting. What is he trying to hide?”

But sometimes the stories are so off-base that they make the scientist in me cringe, and the ‘hot gas’ story is one of those. This has been going around on talk radio for a while, and I hear people in the gas stations bitching about it (because they heard about it on the radio).

Fill ‘Er Up

The crux of this controversy over hot gasoline is that gasoline, like most other liquids, expands when it is heated. (Even water does this, although weird stuff happens to water when it cools, but that’s another story.) So when you pump 10 gallons of hot gasoline into your car’s gas tank, it will be less than 10 gallons when it cools off.

The real problem here is that we measure gasoline in gallons (a volume), when what we’re really interested in is joules (a measure of energy). It’s sort of how we weigh ourselves in pounds (a force), when what we’re really interested in is kilograms (a mass). We’ll encounter a similar controversy, I’m sure, when we finally populate the moon. Weight-conscious people will take a vacation to the moon, step on a scale and say “Hey! I only weigh 33 pounds here, but on Earth I weighed 200 pounds! Why does the Earth government want me to think I’m heavier than I really am?”

(I’m just kidding, of course. When we finally populate the moon, the scales will be calibrated to show what you would way in Earth pounds, even though that number will have essentially no meaning.)

If we measured gasoline in MJ (megajoules), we’d just say “fill ‘er up with a thousand”, not caring how many gallons that is, and we’d use about 5 MJ per mile, and there wouldn’t be a problem; we’d join hands and sing songs about how happy we are that our units finally make sense.

But we don’t do that, so.

How much, exactly, are we talking about?

Where’s My Nerd Hat?

The first thing we need to decide is what the ‘standard temperature’ is for a gallon of gasoline. Really, we need a standard temperature and pressure, but we’ll just ignore pressure for now. (Coming next week: Why you pay more for gasoline in the mountains!)

Since a good ‘room temperature’ is 75°F, we’ll use that as our standard temperature. When we pump gas, we expect that the gas will be at 75°F, and if it’s hotter, then by God, we’re getting ripped off!

In order to calculate the change in volume of a liquid, we use the general equation:

ΔV = β × V₀ × ΔT

This formula says that the change in volume (ΔV) is equal to the initial volume (V₀), multiplied by the change in temperature (ΔT), multiplied by the coefficient of volume expansion (β). Note that all temperatures are specified in Celsius, because that’s the nerd way of talking about temperatures.

For gasoline, β is approximately 9.50×10^-4. See here and here, and convert the number into proper nerd format.

Let’s say you pump 10 gallons of gas on a hot summer day, when the gasoline is 92°F. The gasoline, which is stored in underground tanks, probably doesn’t get this hot, but let’s say it does for the sake of argument. Later, you park your car in your garage and the gasoline cools down to 75°F. This means that the nerd temperature of the gas has changed from 33.3°C to 23.9°C, so ΔT is -9.4°C.

So, we’ve got the following:

β = 9.50×10^-4
V₀ = 10
ΔT = -9.4

I’m leaving off the units here because they balance (trust me), and I’m not bothering to convert our 10 gallons into nerd units because I’d just convert it back afterward anyway. So now we can say:

ΔV = 9.50×10^-4 × 10 × -9.4
ΔV = -0.0893

In other words, after your gasoline cools down, you will have 0.0893 fewer gallons than when you started. Since we started with 10 gallons of gasoline, we now have 9.9107 gallons.

What does this mean in terms of cost? It means that you’ve paid for 0.0893 gallons of gasoline that you weren’t given. At the current local price of $2.959 per gallon, we’re paying 26.4¢ extra for our 10 gallons of gas.

If we consume 10 gallons of gas a week, we’d be paying $13.74 extra every year for gas we never got. We could buy, like, a pizza with that kind of cash. The gasoline companies are denying us one pizza every year!

But Wait, There’s More

Hang on, though, it’s not summertime year-round. What about in the winter, where the temperature drops to a balmy 20°F? Well, then our ΔT is 30.5°C (23.9°C - -6.6°C). We pump the same 10 gallons of gas, and of course β stays the same, so we have:

β = 9.50×10^-4
V₀ = 10
ΔT = 30.5

From the original equation:

ΔV = 9.50×10^-4 × 10 × 30.5
ΔV = 2.8975

Yikes! On really cold days, we’re pulling away from the pump with almost three gallons of gas we didn’t pay for! At the same $2.959 per gallon, that would cost $8.57 or so. If you fill up just twice in the wintertime, you can make back all of the extra money you spent on gas in the summertime, and maybe a little more.

In Summary

Although I’m sure that American corporations will gladly screw you in any way possible for profit, this whole thing is really the problem it’s being made out to be. In the summer days, you effectively pay about 2¢ more per gallon than you should. In the winter, you pay about 86¢ less than you should.

These numbers really are higher than they should be, because the gasoline is stored in underground containers which keeps it warm in the winter and cool in the summer. We’re really probably talking about a cent or so extra in the summer and about 20¢ less in the winter.

What people ought to be more angry about is that when a refinery has to temporarily close, even for just a few days, gas prices across the nation spike, even at stations that don’t depend on that refinery.

That is American corporations sodomizing at their best.

Keynote Blues

Steve Jobs held the second annual WWDC 2006 conference this Monday in San Francisco. If we’d been seeing most of this stuff for the first time, it would have been amazing, but instead it was mostly old hat. Spaces? Yeah, neat. Time machine? Been there. iChat improvements? Yawn.

Gruber did nail it when he said that brushed metal was being taken out back and shot. It’s no longer anywhere to be seen in Leopard: Safari ditched it, Finder ditched it. I think even Calculator may have given it up.

A few interesting things were revealed, both in the keynote and on Apple’s website. Quick Look, as an operating system feature, is an interesting extension of the ‘Preview’ section of the Get Info panel. The Dock’s stacks feature is neat and useful, spelling almost certain doom for Stunt’s Overflow. The Finder finally gets rewritten, possibly in Cocoa, and sports an iTunes-esque interface.

Behind the scenes, native support for multicore machines will make it easier for developers to harness the power of parallel processing, and other improvements to I/O, networking, and computing abound. There’s really a lot of meat here, it’s just hard to see — which brings me to:

The Desktop, which gets superfluous menu bar transparency and reflective dock effects, altered shadows on the windows, and a general visual refresh. Apple really seems to be relying on Core Image and Core Animation for most of their UI, and therefore depending on a decent graphics card to drive it. Already on Tiger, older laptops with less video power are beginning to choke on Core Image effects.

Apple is not yet saying what the minimum system requirements are, but I’m guessing G5 and higher. If they don’t go pure Intel with this release, they certainly will on the next iteration.

Jobs’ “One More Thing…” was Safari for Windows, which was predicted by the Mozilla folks back in January. This seemed kind of lame for a development conference aimed at Macintosh developers. What are we supposed to take away from this — that Apple thinks it’s worth our time to develop applications for Windows?

Gragh.

Wither iPhone?

The only other big piece of news is that the iPhone will support third-party development via Safari. In the keynote, Jobs says that “The Way” to develop applications for the iPhone are with Web 2.0 / Ajax, distributed via standard websites.

This went over like a lead balloon. You can see it for yourself on the keynote address, starting at 1:13:52. The audience is dead silent. There is no applause, no enthusiasm as soon as they realize what they’re being sold. Even Jobs and Scott Forstall seem like they know how bad this ‘solution’ is.

There are two problems here. One is that no matter how many times Jobs said that these web apps behaved ‘just like native apps,’ it’s clear from the keynote that they don’t. Native apps don’t have a location bar pinned to the top of their window. Native apps don’t require you to click ‘Safari’ to launch them. Native apps don’t show a grey-white checkerboard where Safari hasn’t been able to re-render yet.

The other problem is distribution. Jobs played up the ‘distribution and updates are easy’ angle, since the applications are really running on your webserver. But as an application developer, I don’t want to be responsible for running the application. I don’t want to have to maintain a server that responds to web service calls. All I want to do is send the application to the user, possibly take some of their money, and never hear from them again (unless there’s a problem).

Introducing the need to run a server-side application which renders HTML for the iPhone is a huge, huge problem. I’ve done web applications before, and I’ve had to worry about whether or not my site can be reached, whether there’s a problem with the server, whether there are too many people trying to connect at once. It’s not very much fun.

I don’t have a problem with constraining iPhone applications such that their interface is rendered in HTML and their logic is implemented in Javascript — this is, after all, exactly how Dashboard widgets are implemented. But why the need to connect to the internet? Why not just provide widgets that use WebKit?

With WebKit + Javascript + Google’s Gears, you’d be able to make a nice widget for the iPhone, completely local, with its own data store. Slap it into a bundle, give it a nice icon, and let it sit in the home screen along with all of the other first class applications.

If it needs to get information from the internet, fine, but don’t require that. And don’t insult our intelligence by calling these ‘native apps’ when they clearly aren’t.

We'll Always Have Paris

A news.com.au story titled “Why Was Paris Hilton Released?”

It doesn’t take an educated person to deduce that she was released because she and her family are extremely wealthy.

But I suppose that wouldn’t make a good newspaper article.

The Silver Surfer Quarter

Via Businesswire:

This summer, silver is the new gold standard — for movies, with the June 15 release of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and for movie promotions, as Twentieth Century Fox and the Franklin Mint join forces to create an original limited collector’s edition “Silver Surfer” U.S. quarter that will challenge movie goers to Search 4 $ilver[sic].

I was outraged when I first read of this, and was going to call for someone to be fired over it. Seriously, advertisements on our money?

But then I saw the super high-resolution photo of the reverse, and it’s pretty clear that it’s just a bog standard California state quarter with a (bad 4-color process) sticker printed over it. The ‘8’ from ‘1850’ is clearly visible on the Silver Surfer’s head:

Compare with the standard California reverse:

So it’s just a stupid marketing gimmick. Yay Hollywood, I guess.

Car Repair Or, You Can Find Everything On The Internet

My car has had some electronic quirks for about a year now. The driver’s side window is supposed to automatically roll all the way down when you tap the window controls, but this only works intermittently, and lately it doesn’t work at all. When you turn on the headlights, the fog lights also come on, which is supposed to be controllable via a small momentary switch under the steering wheel, but this also only worked intermittently and lately not at all.

The fog lights used to turn on and off seemingly at random, but not anymore — they’re just on all the time now.

But about a week ago, the electrical problem suddenly got a lot worse. The ‘fasten seat belt’ bell went from a calm “bing, bing, bing” to a hyperactive techno DJ on meth: “Brdididing idididing brrdidididididing!” At the same time, the fuel and temp gauges went dead, and the “service wrench” idiot light came on.

The manual helpfully says “see your dealer!” so that’s what I did.

The dealer took a look at it and declared that the Body Control Module (BCM) had an internal short and that it needed to be replaced. The estimate for the repair was $550, less the $45 I paid for the 5-minute diagnostic routine. If I have it done right now, the dealer says, I can be back on the road in an hour.

“I don’t have time right now,” I told the dealer. “I’ll come back and have it done later.” This is a lie, because I really did have time, but I wanted to see what the problem really might be and whether or not I could get it done less expensively.

The first thing to do is see if I can find the part that I need somewhere else, and whether or not it’s possible to replace it manually. A quick google turned up SaturnFans, a community site dedicated to the maintenance and fetish-style love of Saturn automobiles. Multiple threads on their message board indicate that the BCM can be physically installed by a layman, but that it needs to be programmed for the specific car that it’s being put into, which requires special tools.

Tools which cost thousands of dollars.

So, ok, I can’t fix it myself. The next question is, how expensive is this part, really? People on the forums swear by car-part.com, so I head on over there to find the part I need.

Turns out dozens of places in the area have at least one BCM for the ‘02 Saturn SC2, and that it runs in the $100 range. Sweet! A quick call back to the dealer lets me know that the cost to remove, install, and program a BCM is $140.

So now I’m down to less than half of the original $550 estimate. Good enough, right?

Another thread on the SaturnFans forums indicates that there are certain failure modes of the BCM which can be resolved by resetting the unit. This involves removing power to the unit by unhooking the battery.

On a hunch, I go back out to the car and pull the “body comp” fuse. It’s not blown, so I put it back in. This resets the BCM, solving the problem.

Total cost: $45 for the initial diagnosis.

I love the internet.

The Price Of Dreams

All dreams have a price.

Mine costs $65,000. $120,000 would probably be better just so there was enough wiggle room in case of a slow start.

Any takers?

Oh, You Rascally Spammers

So I wrote an entry a while ago about icon design. It was linked from all over the place, starting with John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, and it gathered a lot of comments. Well, a lot of comments compared to the rest of the entries here.

Shortly after the comments died down, a curious thing started happening — I started getting occasional spam comments posted to that entry. This is despite the fact that I’ve custom-built my journal software, and that the API is different from WordPress or MovableType’s commenting systems.

Well, the trickle of spam comments turned into a flood, and thanks to Akismet, none of them have ever made it through to the actual entry. In fact, as of 23 July 2008, Akismet has blocked 454 spam comments for me, the vast majority on that entry.

But even though these comments aren’t getting through, and I never have to see them unless I want to (occasionally I’ll scroll through them for a laugh), it still bugs me that it’s happening at all.

So, to help mitigate this, I’ve changed the URL used for posting comments, and I’ve obfuscated the entire comment form so that it requires Javascript to display. The theory is that spammers don’t evaluate Javascript in their harvesters because there’s too much potential for infinite loops and whatnot, so they won’t see the form and won’t be able to comment.

In theory, anyway.

Oh, also, I’ve made AfterWords be able to evaluate macros within entries now, so the number of spams above is a live count. I really don’t have time to update this entry every day, even though that’s what it might look like I’m doing.

Vector Vs. Raster: The Fool's Game

Craig Hockenberry recently posted an article at the IconFactory regarding resolution independence in image processing. This is part of an ongoing public debate regarding the merits of using vector graphics instead of raster graphics for user interface elements, especially icons. I'm too lazy to link to all of the other people involved in this debate; there's a lot of them. Here are two of the salvos:

• Daniel Jalkut: Resolution Independent Fever
• Sven-S. Porst: Iconic

To paraphrase the problem for those just joining the party: monitors are getting bigger, pixels are getting smaller, and icons are becoming increasingly-larger in order to maintain their relative size on-screen. Some people think that vector-based images are the way to go, because their files are smaller and can scale cleanly to any size. Some think raster-based (pixel-based) images are the way to go, because even if they become very large, they can be specified exactly and are able to be drawn quickly.

This debate is becoming less academic and more pragmatic as time goes on, because Mac OS 10.5 Leopard supports icons that are up to 512x512 pixels large. Which, yes, is crazy.

I'd like to address Hockenberry in particular, because some things in his article really stood out for me. Hockenberry's article has the following main points:

• Today's icons require lots of vectors and are consequently huge
• Rendering vector icons is slow
• Vector icons look bad when scaled to small sizes

Someone's Snorting Something

To support his first argument, "vectorized icons are huge", Hockenberry posts two files -- a 512x512 rasterized PNG image of the CandyBar icon, and a corresponding PDF file that contains the same icon in vector format. As the PNG image is 100KB, and the PDF is about 30 times that size, he draws the conclusion that vectorized icons require more space.

Unfortunately, on this point he is dead wrong. If one uncompresses the PDF file (using pdftk, for example), you can examine the raw data inside of it. What does it contain? A total of 281 rasterized images, presumably one for each layer of the image:

 sdeken01@alondra: ~$ grep -i --binary-files=text "/subtype /image" CandyBar2.pdf | wc -l
 281

How much space do these images take? We can fortunately rely on the output to have a /length tag two lines following the /subtype /image tag, so we just need to look for them and tally them up:

 sdeken01@alondra: ~$ grep -A3 -i --binary-files=text "/subtype /image" CandyBar2.pdf | grep Length | awk '{ print $2 }' | perl -wlne '$t += $_;}print $t;{'
 48911164

Wait, how big was this file again?

 sdeken01@alondra: ~$ ls -al CandyBar2.pdf
 -rw-r--r--  1 sdeken01 pg528391 49306138 2006-11-15 08:05 CandyBar2.pdf

So 48,911,164 bytes out of 49,306,138 -- 99.2% -- are consumed by these images. That means that the actual vector data consumes roughly 394,974 bytes. That's still almost four times the size of the 103,102 byte PNG file, but it's not so bad.

We Don't Need No Steenking Compression

Of course, this is all assuming that PDF is the best format to use to store your vectorized icons. I submit that it is not. PDF is a verbose format which is geared toward representing anything that can be in a document -- text, vectors, tables, footnotes, etc. PDF exists to preserve the formatting of a document that is intended to be printed to a printing device or a computer monitor. It is far too heavyweight for the purposes of representing a vectorized icon.

In the long term, a better approach would be to develop a specialized vector icon format. (No, SVG isn't it. It's worse than PDF in verbosity.) A single Bezier path control point fits into exactly 24 bytes (48 if you want crazy precision), so in a 100KB file you can fit 4000 or so path nodes without any sort of compression. I have no easy way of counting the number of path nodes in the CandyBar vectorized file, but 4000 is an awful lot of points.

If we add compression, and we assume that we can get half the compression of the PNG file (which compresses the 512x512 image with 4 bytes per pixel from an original size of 1.05MB to 103KB, or 90%), we should be able to store close to 10,000 Bezier curve points in a 100KB file.

The gradients don't matter. They should add close to 24 bytes each, the same as a normal control point (8 bytes for the XY coords of each end of the fill, and 16 bytes for the start and end colors).

Rendering Vector Icons Ain't Slow

It's true that rendering the 8MB monstrosity that is the CandyBar PDF is an excruciatingly slow process. But this doesn't mean that rasterizing a vector image is slow. Computers do this all the time. Near-constantly, in fact. I suspect that just before you read this, your computer rasterized every letter in this essay using a vector-based font.

Did you notice a delay?

It's certainly true that rendering a vector-based image takes more time than rendering a raster-based image. However, the difference is small, and it can be mitigated in a number of ways. One way is to use intelligent caching, so that the image is rendered once and then resampled to produce smaller versions. Another is to leverage the graphics card to do some of the rasterization for the CPU.

But in general, rendering a vector image is not the slow, excruciating process that Hockenberry's PDF makes it seem to be.

Let Me Give You A Hint

The final argument -- that rendering vector icons at a small size produces worse results than placing pixels individually -- does hold some water. As the icon gets more cramped, there are more details competing for less pixels, and it's certainly true that an intelligently-designed 16x16 icon will beat a 512x512 icon scaled down in terms of crispness and general look.

But.

A generalization of this argument was put forth earlier by Josh Williams of Firewheel Design, and it's always sat the wrong way with me. Williams sets forth an argument that an icon designed for a specific resolution will look poor when scaled either up or down, because detailed line work which is intended to produce a single pixel at a particular resolution will be mapped to either multiple pixels (when scaled up) or fractional pixels (when scaled down).

Williams' argument bothers me because this is another problem which has been previously solved in the world of typography. Most major fonts have been extensively hinted so that they are legible at small point sizes. Verdana at 12 pt may seem like a bitmap on the screen, since it only stands 10 to 12 pixels high and does not contain any shades of grey, but it is stored on disk as a vector. The same font that produces the highly aliased 12 pt version on the screen is the same font that produces the highly anti-aliased 72 pt version on the printer.

It seems reasonable to me that a mechanism similar to hinting could be created for icon design. If you have a design element which is intended to be exactly one pixel wide, you could add hints to your control points to ensure that it uses exactly one pixel at every resolution. Or, as your design gets scaled down, you could use hints to remove paths that would result in unnecessary clutter, allowing the major design elements to stand out.

We do not have the tools to do such things today, and I'm not sure we ever will. After all, storing a customized 16x16 raster image doesn't take much space, and it's less cumbersome to work with than a series of carefully-crafted control point hints. I would expect icons to move toward a hybrid vector-raster format in the future, where certain sizes are represented with a raster image, and larger sizes are rendered from vector images. Apple has already laid the groundwork for this with their ICNS format, and some open source groups (such as the Tango project) are starting to get the same idea.

---

Hat-tip to John Gruber for the link. John notes:

Arguing for a new vector format optimized for iconography is not the same thing as arguing that vector art should be used for producing higher-resolution icons today.

I don't think anyone really disagrees about using vector art to design high-resolution icons. The majority of the 'sexy' icons on the Mac today are rasterized versions of vector icons -- the Firefox icon is vector-based, all of Jasper Hauser's icons are vector based, and there are plenty of other designers who use vector art extensively when producing icons.

The only question is: should these vector forms be distributed and used to render the icons directly on the fly, or should they be pre-rasterized and touched up for certain dimensions? I submit that we should have our cake and eat it too.

Update update: John meant distributing, not producing. Case closed!

Mama said there'd be days like this.

Things that have happened to me thus far today, with five hours to go:

• I woke up with my entire upper body feeling like I’d been in a car wreck the day before. I’d spent the prior day pushing soil, sand, and cement underneath my front porch — the soil that had been under it had eroded away due to my laziness in getting a retaining wall built.
• I went to a (yet another) job interview, this time for a firm which deals almost exclusively in Microsoft technologies. I sold myself pretty hard, but my résumé reads like an advertisement for open source. I did happen to run into a guy I knew from a previous job, who turned out to be the director of the department I was interviewing for. So that’s a plus.
• I got home and immediately left again to take my dog to the vet. He’d developed some sort of rash on Wednesday which we’d tried to treat (using my extensive medical background¹) but which, it turns out, needs actual medicine.
• The dog also got two shots, bringing the total of the visit to $123.36, which is just about $123.26 more than I have. (I still have two nickels to rub together.)
• The dog (who has been lethargic for the past two days due to his rash) and I (who am normally lethargic) head to FedExKinko’sOfAmericaCorp so that I can fax in some information to some people who just can’t wait another day for it. In doing so, I fumble around for about ten minutes with one of the Xerox CopyCenter machines (the exact model of which I’ve been using for the last two years at the job I was just “displaced” from) trying to figure out how to get it to send a fax. Just at the point where I was about to yell at the ‘associates’ for not paying any attention to me, I saw the actual fax machine sitting behind the copy stations. Go figure.
• I head out back to the van (yes, the van, the minivan, THE TRANSFORMATION IS COMPLETE), and the dog is sitting in the driver’s seat. I push him off and move to get into the van, and he jumps back up onto the seat. We stare at each other for a while. Eventually he jumps back down. I then put the key in the ignition, and ta-da! The van is dead.
• Then Michelle picked me up and we drove back to the house and it had burned down.

Ok, I made that last one up. It turns out the battery in the van had died; I had to give up both my nickels (and find 1083 more) to buy a new one. We’re still having it checked, because it’s sort of odd to have a battery die all of a sudden.

Other updates:

The job search is still lumbering along — I’ve got one solid offer and I’m sending résumés out as fast as I can avoid it. Thanks to all the people who sent me their best and to all of the people who gave me attention, even if they made fun of me while doing it. (Yes, I’m looking at you.)

The baby girl is having trouble getting toots out. She’s eating voraciously now, which is good because she should be about three days old right now — she was three weeks early, but in perfectly good shape. Her little big brother likes to gently stroke her hair, and he sometimes walks over to the bassinet and lays his head against hers, which is how he hugs people.

The god damned retaining wall is still not done. I was going to work on it when I got back from the vet, but that turned out to be deception.

The Diary-X Crap is still sitting in the den because I haven’t had time to arrange anything. Michelle took over, because she has initiative and I have procrastination.

The random crap is a chess game for OS X that I’ve been unhealthily working on since I lost my job. When I told some friends about it, they said “let me guess — it doesn’t work, but it looks really good.” Yes. Shut up.

That is all.

---

1. Gleaned entirely from watching ER, House, and Doogie Houser. Funny story: when Michelle and I were still in the hospital after Alyssa was born, I once referred to my “extensive medical knowledge” in front of a nurse. She turned to me and asked “Where are you going to med school?” I don’t say that in front of medical personnel anymore.

BlueSecurity closes its doors

BlueSecurity, who were attempting to reduce spam by making it economically not feasible to send, have been forced to cease operations after recent efforts by the spammers.

… Several leading spammers viewed this change as a strategic threat to their spam business. The week before last, these spammers launched a series of attacks against us, taking down hundreds of thousands of other websites via a massive Denial-of-Service attack and causing damage to ISPs, website owners and Internet users worldwide. They also began a relentless campaign of email intimidation against many members of the Blue Community.

After recovering from the attack, we determined that once we reactivated the Blue Community, spammers would resume their attacks. We cannot take the responsibility for an ever-escalating cyber war through our continued operations.

There are two things to note here. One is that BlueSecurity scared the shit out of the spammers, because it actually had a possibility of working.

The second is that spammers now effectively control the internet. If you challenge their power, they will crush you. And right now, no one can stop them.

The Underbelly of the Internet

I mentioned in my first entry here that I’d not renewed the domain ‘stephendeken.com’ during all of the retardation surrounding the collapse of Diary-X. I thought I might talk a little more about what happened there.

When I first realized the domain expired, I actually had a 20-day window in which I could have paid my old registrar (gandi.net) €100 (about $125 USD) to recover the domain, but I refused; I felt the price was too high for the amount I’d originally paid. I registered stephendeken.net instead.

On the day the domain finally expired and was free to register, I tried to snag it before anyone else did, but I didn’t manage it in time. A squatter operating under the name ‘domibot’ got to it first. So, even though I didn’t feel like it was worth $125 to save, I began to investigate the recourse I had under ICANN rules.

It turns out that ICANN forces you to go through a dispute resolution process overseen by a paid arbiter. The fee varies by institution, but there are only three recognized institutions, all of whom have fees starting at $1000 USD. So, for personal domain disputes, you’re pretty much screwed.

I reasoned that it would be in a squatter’s best interest to charge exactly or just under $1000 for such domains, because the alternative would be a long arbitration that would cost just as much anyway. So, in the interests of curiousity, I emailed the squatter and asked how much they wanted. They replied:

I am asking 950 US dollars for this domain
thank you

Good call! I replied pointing out how efficient that number was, and told them I wasn’t going to pay a nickel over $50 for it. (Later, I would decide that I wouldn’t pay them anything at all, but we never got that far.) In the same email, I asked them how long they intended to sit on it.

Their reply:

800

Note that that number is the entire message.

A few more replies by me went unanswered, probably because they couldn’t smell money from me.

Today, I found the domain was free and could be registered. So I paid the $15 to register it for a year. I don’t know that I’ll use it — I’ve become fond of the .net domain in the meantime — but at least it’s not a spammy gateway page.