[OT] another proxy, but not open source :-(

[Aplin, Justin M]

On 5/25/2010 4:59 AM, Scott Bennett wrote:
>       You may well be assuming too much.  It's not easy to know at this
> point because it's still undocumented vaporware.  I still think the
> whole thing smacks of being a honeypot for gullible humans.
>    

I'll admit I could be totally off base. But it's 5 in the morning and I 
honestly can't think of another way they could implement what they're 
trying to do (effectively, anyway) without an enormous infrastructure. 
Cheapest way to create one seems to be distributing your free software 
and having your users act as... oh wait, somebody thought of that already!

>       Well, that, at least, happens all the time.  How many installations
> of Windows Server 200[38] would you guess there are, for example?
>    

Maybe I've been out of the game for too long, but in my experience 
proprietary software is used either because it works well, or because it 
comes with support (i.e. insurance). The Windows servers, for example, 
work well in corporate environments running a large number of Windows 
machines in a Domain, and often said corporation will purchase support 
to go with it. It's worth the cost to keep things running (somewhat) 
smoothly. If you have a free alternative that works just as well and can 
be maintained by your staff without too much ado, odds are it will be 
used. Apache on *nix comes to mind as one example, as opposed to IIS.

So if we have two free softwares, one open-source and one closed-source, 
neither with any *explicit* support, the choice is going to come down to 
which one works better, and which one looks better. If they put out a 
crappy product, odds are it'll get uninstalled by the majority of users 
who just don't want to bother fucking with it. If it's a decent product, 
however, and it has a decent UI, and their production team can keep up 
with releases and bugfixes and whatnot, we may be in for some viable 
competition. We'll see. Somehow I doubt it.

>       China has done that at least once already.  They apparently managed
> to get ~80% of what the bridge authorities had at the time, IIRC.  Yet
> the remainder continued to operate and serve many people in China during
> that time.  And bridges come and go, just like ordinary relays.  Many
> are on dynamically assigned IP addresses, so their addresses change,
> thereby invalidating those data in the Chinese government's list.
>    

The picture in my head reminds me of this, for some reason: 
http://xkcd.com/350/

>> I am a tad unnerved at the number of links to the donation page,
>> though I appreciate the costs associated with such an endeavor.
>>
>>      
>       Indeed.
>    

As an aside, they do have a shiny-looking website, and I won't pretend 
users aren't attracted to that. We could do with a little shininess 
ourselves. Still though, pandering for donations when you're not even 
offering any sort of product or service... honeypot indeed.

~japlin

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