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you, personally, may be a high margin customer, but some, and perhaps a lot, of the $5/no customers are potential liabilities due to not patching software or libraries or choosing terrible passwords for their services, databases, etc.

one decent incident can cost a multiple of a year's revenue for the account.


is this just about cpu power from exploits?


in my experience, it's more about trying to keep your IP space clean for the rest of your customers and bandwidth. You either get your IP space blacklisted or some idiot starts burning 1Gbps on ssh attempts and you start getting abuse email from the .mil space which is awkward. Plus, you gotta pay for the bandwidth.

That 5/mo customer is much more likely to disappear than pay for the data they used.


> That 5/mo customer is much more likely to disappear than pay for the data they used.

Is there no such thing as prepaid, "the VM stops when your credits run out" VPS hosting? Seems to work well-enough for Twilio.


no, more like someone's instance gets pwn-ed and is now part of a botnet and DO is getting calls and or isp-blocked and has to devote staff time to the incident.


Google has a history of age discrimination and losing in court, going back to the founders of the company.

See Reid v Google where Brian Reid, a key developer of the tech we use, was told his ideas "were too old to matter" and that he was an "old fuddy duddy."

Google fought it and lost.

https://www.law.com/therecorder/almID/1202464321723/?slretur...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scientist...


>Google fought it and lost.

"The case was settled out of court", settlement is not a loss, its being allowed to sweep your dirty deeds under the rug with no consequences.


Reid v. Google was settled out of court in 2012 for an undisclosed amount.


yes and no. they lost on appeal to the state supreme court on whether evidence about age bias could be used in the lawsuit.

then they settled.


unless someone has a plan to burn and spew the old cells into the atmosphere, causing the earth to heat up, it will never be as big a problem as gas cars.

(that is the worst case, where auto makers just bury the cells in the ground. thankfully, that's not actually the case. they reuse battery packs and are scaling up techniques to recover the rare metals from them. you haven't heard much about this at scale because few packs have actually hit their end of life.)


that's what the model 3 does. it induces resistance in the motor at 0 rpm to generate heat which is then transferred to the coolant loop to heat the battery.

but in order to warm up the very large battery pack, on a cold morning you need to turn the car on (well) before you start driving to have it warm enough for full regen.


You can, of course, do this from the Tesla app. It’s not like an ICE car where (usually) you have to physically be in it to start it.


well, except for one of the largest advertising and data collecting companies on the planet, that really really wants to know where you are right now.


yeah, what slayed me about this resume tool for coders is that it doesn't accept plain text, but does accept word/doc


if you're a spy using it to hide your identity from websites when you visit, it would be good for your VPN to have a mix of normal activity and spy activity. If you run your own, it's going to have a weird pattern of traffic that might stand out to a website with decent analytics.


This is exactly why Tor is publicly available.


"can we name anyone who has been prosecuted for what turned out to clearly be benevolent research work?"

Randal Schwartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randal_L._Schwartz


That isn't a great example. He managed to get his conviction overturned because of the lack of criminal intent, but what he did was pretty stupid.

Rather ill-advisedly, the Perl-programming guru (who's written several books on the subject) tried to prove his worth by running a password cracking package after he'd left in order to produce evidence that security practices had deteriorated since his departure. Instead of re-hiring Schwartz, as he hoped, Intel called in the police and he was charged with hacking offences.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/05/intel_hacker_charges...


Yeah, I think you'll find when you dig into the details that that case is not a great example for you.


Instead of doubt, can you give us concrete reasons?


This is from memory, but it's been discussed on HN before, so you can also consult the search bar. Schwartz had a contract to do sysadmin work for Intel. In the course of doing that work, he backdoored some of the systems he worked on. After his employment with the firm that had staffed him at Intel concluded, he continued to use those backdoors to access Intel's systems. His claim is that it was necessary to do so, in order to complete work Intel had asked him to do. But from what I recall, he was caught using those backdoors after any relationship he'd had with Intel had been severed.

It's not the crime of the century, but it's not a case of someone doing benevolent security research getting caught. Nobody practicing today would backdoor a client computer, use the backdoor after their engagement had ended, and expect anyone to find that action defensible.



"The amount we don't pay justifies the amount a consumer does pay"


http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement

"In all other countries, listening to Last.fm Radio will soon require a subscription of €3.00 per month."


And at the same time they weren't treating us as customers, more like second rate users.


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