I've done this 20 years ago. I'd be jetted around China meeting various people and introduced as a "business partner". Of course, I didn't actually do anything except smile and talk on casual subjects. Still, it was interesting and fun at the time. The benefits were good too.

I asked at one point "why", and I was told "Chinese don't trust Chinese. Chinese will trust Chinese who have Western business partners, so if you are my business partner, they'll trust me and I'll get the business".

Hard to argue with that.

Unfortunately, the vendor could take it out on the company.

"Oh, our software maintenance fees have increased by 100% (for you only)"

No, since their company was so dependent on Vendors software, they couldn't realistically do that without paying the consequences later.

Two suggestions:

1/ find some kind of fix, then post the exploit anonymously

2/ report the bug to a third party who will then approach the vendor with a "fix in x days or else we post to the world" proposal. This way, the original party can avoid the potential backlash from Vendor

egad! I understood every word of that!

There's an iphone app for that!

(for solving the cubes, that is)

Nah, it just blew.

I've done data recovery, it takes a lot less than a year for deleted files to degrade.

I've recovered files from ntfs file systems 3 years after they've been deleted.

So, if you believe in this idea so strongly, create it yourself.

Just remember that you have to take into account little things like:
- fraud prevention
- interfacing with wildly varying ad servers with wildly different features and wildly different conventions for ad calls
- the need to pull inappropriate ads from the cached ad queue asynchronously
- proper reporting of ads actually delivered
- proper ad rotation, which will depend on ads have actually been delivered
- handling rotation limited ad deliveries
- different webserver environments (IIS, apache, yadda, yadda, yadda.)
- and many, many more...

Can most of this be done? Actually it is possible, although I suspect that the resulting adserver would be feature limited (remember, it needs to work across all kinds of different webservers) and there are some features that cannot be implemented without a central adserver to coordinate the data.) The end result might be something that is too complex for websites to actually implement.

One of the biggest barriers would be the website owners. They don't want to mess with their servers just so they can deliver ads. Contrast installing something to manage the cached delivery of ads pulled from some ad providers adserver vs doing something like adding two lines of javascript (one to load the ad delivery library and one to make an actual ad call.

It all seems simple until you actually have to implement it.

Don't consider marring this hypochondriac and having children with her. She'll pass that insanity onto the kids.

Find a healthy girlfriend.

Basically, when the site crashed, he had three copies (2 RAID, 1 backup) of the data: all corrupt. The guy wasn't totally retarded when it came to backups, just 80% retarded.

No, no. He was still 100% retarded.

If you don't test your backups, it means you don't have backups.

Anyone with an ounce of sense and a modicum of experience will realize that ol' Murphy plays merry havoc with even the best of plans.

If the data is important, you have to assume everything can and will go tits up - probably all at the same time so your backup plans have to take this into account.

sit down to use it after lunch then look up surprised when 40 minutes have gone by and I'm late for my next meeting.

That's because the browser and network are quite slow.

distributed defense.

Denyhosts. ( http://www.denyhosts.net/ ).

It works.

I want whatever drugs they are having! They seem pretty zippy!