[JA] Binky
- From: "George Lunt" <glunt@xxxxxxxx>
- To: <juno_accmail@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 2 May 2004 12:22:33 -0700
Hi All,
Over the past 6 months I've been working with Tyler Akins (Binky
developer) to nail down actual usage patterns of Binky (Web "page
grabber" & file sending program) . This has been primarily prompted
because the Binky system is most likely going to either have to be
removed this summer from the computer it's been running on these past
years. It's not a particularly "portable" system and the question is
should Tyler even bother.
The primary questions are "who's using it, how often, and for what".
When we first started "studying" usage patterns last fall it quickly
became apparent that by far the largest % of requests were coming from
Russia, and a significant portion of these were for porn and hacker
information. Toss in other Eastern European & Asian countries and
you've easily covered 95% or better of all requests received at Binky.
This has been quite an eye-opener considering Binky's past history,
which began as a Juno_accmail project for Juno users only. Try to
remember that Binky has always had a Juno & Juno_accmail connection,
although it can operate totally independently of either of these. I
bring this up because you can't even use the Juno we know, with the
e-mail program, in these countries that are using Binky so heavily.
To shed a little additional light on this problem, a request for a porn
pic easily requires the transmission of 150-200 kb of data (or more)
compared to grabbing a text page, which would probably require the
transmission of a 10th of the data. So one individual using Binky to
"grab" porn materials can easily eat up as much Internet resources as
100 other individuals grabbing Web pages.
Further review was done and we started a systematic "blocking" of
individuals and have expanded that now to complete countries to this
overuse under control. I should also mention that because of its
widespread use the Binky address has been "used" by viruses as a spoof
address and that ends up bringing additional spam. Spam, spam bounces,
& viruses now make up as much as 2/3 of the e-mail received by Binky.
All-in-all, it may well be that Binky has outlived its usefulness and
should be put out to pasture with much of the other "e-mail only"
related Internet usage hardware & software. So I'd like to hear from
anyone who has used Binky within, say, the past year and how bad you'd
miss it if it were gone completely or replaced with a simple text
oriented Web page grabber. You can write me offlist if you prefer, but
I'd like to hear from Binky users especially if you think it still
serves a purpose because silence will probably lead to its total
elimination.
George Lunt ..... so. cal.
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