Practically free? What world do you live in? Employee cost, opportunity cost - those resources aren't free at all. You either have to hire people to sift through all that crap, or you have to hire people to write code to sift through all that crap. Both of those are expensive as hell, for something that doesn't benefit the company at all. There's simply no reason to do it, and a cost of millions of dollars.

Do you honestly think they'd waste the resources to go hunting through the hotmail accounts of people who they didn't think (with good cause) were stealing from them?

Most likely this started with them searching the corp email account of the guy sending the stuff, and when they saw it going "to: suspect@hotmail.com" they followed the rabbit trail.

They don't seem to be mining emails for advertising content or other such, this was a very limited scope (and most likely completely manual) investigation due to what they found in an internal employee's mail.

You may have misunderstood - I think they're wretched bastards and I have no sympathy for them. I just think they're justified in their paranoia.

Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean we aren't out to get them.

An IM platform that hardly makes any money and, at the end of the day, is just an IM platform, gets bought for $19B, and then a promising startup doing something technologically new, exciting and different that hasn't been done 100 times before is only worth $2B, to the same buyer?

The only thing that makes sense is that said buyer is buying end users, without caring so much about the companies or technology. That, after all, is the only thing really valuable about WhatsApp - lots of people whose data can be sold and who can be marketed to.

Exactly. If I'm a Ukrainian soldier and I believe my death may help bring about a true end to Russian tyranny, it may be worth fighting. If I look at the numbers and say "we're screwed either way," then it's just a choice of which is better: to live with Russian tyranny in a neighboring territory (not where I live), or to be dead and have the same Russian tyranny in the same neighboring territory (where I can't live, because I'm not alive).

Easy choice, that.

Well, according to the OP, about 50% joined the Russian side, so even without the outside forces you'd have most people dead, assuming equal training and weaponry (which if they're all from the same base, is pretty likely). Also, most of these guys would have served together for years, so it's likely they didn't relish the idea of killing (and being killed by) their comrades when the alternative was "pack up your shit and go home to be with your families."

Now add in the outside Russian forces, and anyone who fought back would have been quickly destroyed. Ukrainians aren't stupid, but they can be pretty pragmatic. The ones from Crimea were likely Russian heritage or at least had Russian sympathies, and the ones who were just stationed there likely didn't give much of a rat's arse about losing the peninsula after most of the people there voted to leave Ukraine. So rather than dying, they went home.

There's a lot to be said for living to fight another day, and it seems like these people "get it" in that regard. Why die for a lost cause that you may not really believe in? Why defend a peninsula that doesn't really seem to want to be defended? Russia takes what it wants, the "allies" of Ukraine have made it clear they have no intention of doing more than a bit of posturing in response, why stay and fight?

Right, that was mostly to make a nice even $500/yr, I think mine is actually closer to $75. And of course, a lot of the entry level plans are quite a bit cheaper, and there's all the discounting and such that happens, and a fair portion of bills is taxes and fees.

But, using $42/month as a starting number gives a very generous cushion for the numbers - given what's actually charged to most customers, the $10k for a peering link seems even more insignificant.

I understand you probably don't work with this type/scale of equipment/network on a regular basis, but the fact is $10k *is* extremely cheap. It's also probably a bit of a bogus number, or at least incorporates a whole lot of stuff beyond the actual connection (not just the cost of the optics, but some of the cost of the blade/chassis, and cost of power and rack space over an X year period, etc). The optics themselves are pretty cheap now - probably no more than $800/side, and with the scale of the large operators it's a good bet they're paying $500/ea for 10g SFPs. Believe me, a network operator of this size sneezes 10g optics without thinking about it - their on-site guys probably play dominoes with the spares.

A little fun math: Let's say for the sake of easy math that the average customer pays $42/month for broadband, or $500/year. Let's say the average lifecycle of a 10g optical link and the associated routers is 3 years, and the single cross-connect costs $10k, spread across those 3 years, for a cost of approximately $3500/yr. So, ignoring the cost of the last-mile infrastructure (partly because the vast majority is in place and has probably been paid off for years), the cable company would have to add 7 customers to pay for each new cross-connect. Again using nice round decimal numbers for the sake of easy math, at a cap of 50mbps per subscriber, you could have 200 customers fully saturating their links before you would saturate the 10gbps cross-connect, assuming ALL customer traffic was being routed that way. So if your first 7 customers paid for the cross-connect, and we're talking about 3-year equipment lifecycles, that leaves just shy of $290k for the ISP to spend on their other infrastructure and overhead.

Summary: I think they'll be just fine, and not need to raise your fees (they probably will raise them anyway, but that's an entirely different discussion).

A lot of towns/cities will stop traffic for things like very large pre-organized motorcycle rides, convoys, funeral processions, and the like. Just because you're not as special as the president doesn't mean he's being treated quite like a king. Stop and Go traffic is for individuals, while police escorts and blocked traffic are for large convoys, and the POTUS happens to travel in a large convoy.

Yep, it's pretty common... they do that when you don't maintain them properly, which is also pretty common. There's a wonderful thing called preventative maintenance, which is a pain in the ass but means your car isn't likely to spontaneously break down on the side of the road. It's why my car with just shy of 200k miles hasn't let me down, and why the one before that made it to 320k, only letting me down once when the timing belt snapped - I hadn't checked the proper interval on that car, and accidentally took it to double that. Fortunately it was a non-interference engine, so I changed the belt and kept going.

You can bet the Beast won't overheat in traffic though, because it's no doubt meticulously maintained.

Up until your last statement, I was following... DNS based techniques have been widely settled on as the stupid, lazy option which pushes the cost onto innocent third party service providers, and isn't really that effective for all the reasons already cited in this thread (primarily, that it redirects based on where the user's DNS resolver lies, which may be on the opposite side of the country from the user).

For web-based traffic, properly implemented redirects are typically the best option. For other services with a dedicated client, there are much better options that can be implemented, and can also provide a much better user experience.

Correct, the short TTLs are for the "traffic management" portion of things rather than the "global" portion of things, but in practice they're typically coupled. I've had many conversations with devs in the past about why we wouldn't want to just set GTM to use a TTL of 0. As I recall, we ended up setting it at 60. Yes, that's 60 seconds. So essentially, if an entire datacenter dropped off the face of the planet, things should fail over to an alternate site within approximately monitoring frequency + TTL. As a slightly amusing side effect, this means when the GTM system has a major problem, everyone's cache expires long before anyone has a chance to fix it, causing massive service outages. Sadly, massive outages are usually a bad time to tell the decision makers "I told you so..."

Rather than mucking about with DNS or routing protocols, the proper method is to build this into the app layer. For web traffic, the initial load of the page should check the source IP and issue an appropriate redirect to a geo-specific server pool. For failover, round robin DNS and an intelligent client/resolver that will try more than one IP address provide the answer. Unfortunately, some resolvers and browsers will stop on the first error instead, so this isn't a perfect solution either.

Just remember that most decisions in the tech industry are made by technically inept bean counters, and everything will make much more sense.

My address is very real, and perfectly routable within my network. I'm making the point that I don't trust any of the public DNS resolvers to be run correctly and provide reliable results. And 7 years doesn't make me a newbie, it means I have an old DNS server. Also, 7 years ago is when I moved and re-IP'd my network. Prior to that I believe I was using 192.168.1.100. For awhile the two networks were bridged with a VPN, so changed my network to make everything easily routable. So, I'm not entirely sure what your point is.