Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

You might have heard of the Warcraft III custom map DOTA, otherwise known as Defense of the Ancients. A particular flavour, Dota Allstars, is incredibly popular on Blizzard’s WC3 bNet servers, but getting the latest maps can be a problem because the popular distribution sites are always down. So, if you want to download the latest DOTA, this is the place to find it!

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An Introduction

You’ve heard that private file sharing networks exist, but you’ve probably never had a chance to explore one from the inside. These networks of software, music, television, and movie pirates often are run on the internal network infrastructure of private educational institutions. Because a university network has a fixed set of IP addresses, college pirates can run DC++ and write simple scripts to only allow users from the internal IP pool, or even the residential dormitory pool. This prevents unwanted interference (RIAA, MPAA, Police) with the network by simply making it invisible to the outside world. Also, most university networks are lightly-satured high-speed ethernet, giving student pirates the bandwidth to share large files.

While I attended Cornell University, students there ran a large DC++ hub to share files. There were anywhere between 1000 and 2000 users of the DC++ hub, which provided access to terabytes of shared files. Before I left the University to work, I transfered a complete set of users’ file lists to my home computer for later analysis. With 1215 XML file lists from DC++, I wrote a few perl scripts to calculate metrics on the 600mb data set.

Interestingly, the DC++ hub appears to still be around at its old redirect address thchub.no-ip.com:3307. Apparently a student r253141224 is hosting the service on his dorm computer 128.253.141.224.

Data From 20,000 Feet

From the file lists I have, there were 2,456,462 unique files, 5,424,446 total files, 19.07 unique terabytes, and 75.55 total terabytes. Here’s a histogram and data listing of the most popular file types:

mp3	1857432
jpg	828815
m4a	312173
png	264820
gif	224034
avi	203304
dll	133889
wma	116851
htm	82130
zip	79114

The file types follow a classic long-tail distribution, and let us query the data in more interesting ways. For example, for avi movie files, what were the most popular file names? Here’s the top 20:

crash.avi	90
pulp fiction.avi	76
garden state.avi	74
office space.avi	74
good will hunting.avi	72
wedding crashers.avi	67
sin city.avi	66
lost - 2x05 - ...and found.avi	65
super troopers.avi	63
zoolander.avi	60
robin hood - men in tights.avi	59
lost - 2x09 - what kate did.avi	58
eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.avi	57
lost - 2x04 - everybody hates hugo.avi	57
memento.avi	57
american beauty.avi	55
batman begins.avi	55
mean girls.avi	55
lost - 2x07 - the other 48 days.avi	54
old school.avi	54

We can take advantage of common patterns in the data to try and find other patterns, but I’ll save that for another day, and another post in what will undoubtably become a series.

I am not sure why the local papers would include this information…

Please not that this is not medical advice, and is not being given by a medical professional. I simply want to recount my experiences for your education and reading pleasure, and hopefully pass along a few tips.

The Background

Three days in Cancun is enough time to seriously screw your body up. The equatorial sun is hot and direct, and the reflection of the sun off and in water will fry you as well. The dark-skinned mexicans aren’t to be emulated, because their bodies naturally protect them better.

The first day, we arrived around noon, and went down to the beach. I was wearing a shirt for some of the time, not for some of the time. I didn’t feel anything, and it was cloudy, but when I went back to the hotel, I had a bad sunburn. The next two days I tried to avoid the sun, wear clothes, and wear sunscreen. It worked, but the damage was already done.

The Pain

Intensely painful to move or touch, my entire upper body was covered in red, burnt skin, as well as parts of my foot, and my calves, the back of which were particularily tender. The etremities and my chest began to slowly heal first, my face gently peeling with the rest of them. However, my upper arms and shoulders developed severly burned skin and blisters, and seeped clear fluid for many days.

The Treatment

Aloe Vera gel and topical anaesthetic and anti-microbial agents help. Taking an anti-inflammatory such as Advil (ibuprofen) or Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) works well. Tylenol may not be as effective in relieving swelling and pain. Avoid scratching, tearing, or irritating the skin. Avoid more exposure to sunlight. Avoid alcohol or other drying agents. Eat and sleep well, and drink lots of water.

All in all, I think I’ll be ok, but it’s not an experience I want again.

I tried the Speakeasy bandwidth test utility and got some amazing results:

This is on a 1.2MB/s LAN connection over 54Mb/s wifi, which either makes the Cornell internet connection prescient (it can guess bits?) or Speakeasy’s tool completely wrong.

Update

Don’t post when you’re sleepy! 5600kbs = .7 MB/s, so this is within the range of what should be happening. We were getting weird results that morning in the 300kbs range, as well, which make me think it was on some kind of different scale, as that would have been really really slow…