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My fraternity house had a housing license for up to 22 people. We had a /16. Though, my understanding is that only the first /24 is currently routed to the ho

by KMag 10y ago

My fraternity house had a housing license for up to 22 people. We had a /16. Though, my understanding is that only the first /24 is currently routed to the house, and we moved to a larger house that's licensed for 50-something residents. Recall AllAdvantage.com, which had a pyramid-scheme style payout for installing spyware on your computer and browsing the web. Payout capped after browsing 48 hours per month with the spyware on. One of the guys trimmed down Win95 and bought a student VMWare license. A gig of RAM was about $4k at that time. He scripted everything up so that at boot time, the Win95 guest would mount an SMB share from the host, remove the first line from a shared CSV file containing fake account details, and proceed to register a fake account at AllAdvantage with him as the referrer, and randomly browse for 48 strait hours (using a local caching web proxy) like a meth head on a bender, and then shut down. Monitoring software on the host would see the shut down VM and spin up a new one with a new IP. The VM IP assignment code hopped all over the /16 to reduce suspicion. AllAdvantage went out of business before it failed to ban him. 30 VMs ran simultaneously. In a 30-day month, he had 450 VMs run, and got just under $2 in referral fees per VM. The fake accounts never made enough money to get cheques mailed to their fake addresses, so AllAdvantage didn't get returned mail or un-cached cheques, but he was still very surprised that he never got caught. He figured he had less tan 50% chance of making it 4 months and paying off his 1 GB of RAM. He wasn't really doing it for the money, but saw it more as a kind of cat-and-mouse game. He was always doing stuff like that, enjoying being the mouse in a cat-and-mouse game, with almost none of it for money. He just got a kick out of seeing people doing silly things and demonstrating the silliness of their ideas. You can get into a fair amount of mischief with a /16, which is presumably why now they only route the first /24 to the house.

Dylan16807 10y ago
So did he make enough money to pay off the ram? You didn't specify if they went out of business before or after he got a payout.
- KMag 10y ago
  Yes, he made a few thousand dollars net profit over 7 to 9 months. He also had a poker bot running for a while (on sites that didn't mention bots in their ToS) and kept complete logs of cards seen and player actions. There were plenty of players who could beat his bot, but his bot would refuse to sit down at tables with players with too good records against it. With three credit cards running three accounts, that poker bot was paying his rent for the first year or two after he moved out of the fraternity house. He told me a couple of times that he'd give me FTP access to his logs, but never got around to it. When I heard that RC4 had a bias in its key schedule, I thought a bit about how to make an unbiased shuffle, and figured that a lot of people would use a naive biased shuffle. I was curious if my friends poker hands would show such a bias. I also wanted to check against the Perl, GNU C, MS C, and Visual Basic built-in rand() implementations, checking for srand(time()) and srand(time()^getpid()). (Perl still ruled the web in those days.) Later, an academic paper came out explaining that the most common poker site software was written in Pascal, and had both flaws I wanted to look for (plus another flaw due to an off-by-one error in the author's understanding of the Pascal Random() API.) I didn't think to look at popular Pascal implementations' pseudorandom number generator implementations, so I doubt I would have found the predictable prng seeding flaw via my friend's logs, but there's a chance I would have. I'm not sure how much an edge in poker the shuffle bias flaw gives, but I imagine it's tiny.

by KMag 10y ago

Dylan16807 10y ago

So did he make enough money to pay off the ram? You didn't specify if they went out of business before or after he got a payout.

KMag 10y ago
Yes, he made a few thousand dollars net profit over 7 to 9 months. He also had a poker bot running for a while (on sites that didn't mention bots in their ToS) and kept complete logs of cards seen and player actions. There were plenty of players who could beat his bot, but his bot would refuse to sit down at tables with players with too good records against it. With three credit cards running three accounts, that poker bot was paying his rent for the first year or two after he moved out of the fraternity house. He told me a couple of times that he'd give me FTP access to his logs, but never got around to it. When I heard that RC4 had a bias in its key schedule, I thought a bit about how to make an unbiased shuffle, and figured that a lot of people would use a naive biased shuffle. I was curious if my friends poker hands would show such a bias. I also wanted to check against the Perl, GNU C, MS C, and Visual Basic built-in rand() implementations, checking for srand(time()) and srand(time()^getpid()). (Perl still ruled the web in those days.) Later, an academic paper came out explaining that the most common poker site software was written in Pascal, and had both flaws I wanted to look for (plus another flaw due to an off-by-one error in the author's understanding of the Pascal Random() API.) I didn't think to look at popular Pascal implementations' pseudorandom number generator implementations, so I doubt I would have found the predictable prng seeding flaw via my friend's logs, but there's a chance I would have. I'm not sure how much an edge in poker the shuffle bias flaw gives, but I imagine it's tiny.