Redi-Vivus.com - Reloaded

[Hirazi Blue]

I wouldn't worry about that (yet ), bryitis...
It seems to me, their system just isn't able to cope with
all the frantically downloading Softimage-users at the moment... ;)
There's always next month (one hopes... )

[Letterbox]

I wouldn't worry about that (yet ), bryitis...
It seems to me, their system just isn't able to cope with
all the frantically downloading Softimage-users at the moment... ;)
There's always next month (one hopes... )

Yes it can, but W#$#$# dont want to behave...

see xsibase for the reasons why.

JP

[Jim]

Letterbox, first off, I want to thank you for the contribution to the Softimage community. I was wondering though, and bryitis mentioned this, is there any reason you don't just put a torrent out for these files, and let the users do all the sharing so it takes the load off your servers? If the intent is to make them freely available to all, that seems like it should be the easiest way with the least amount of grief. If you have a reason for not wanting them on there then that would be understandable, it just seems like it may alleviate some of the grief in this.

[Deracus]

And there it goes...server down due to overload by mischievous individuals....

Whilst i understand your anger about this persons, i do have to ask again, why don´t you use an account-system with free registration + captcha during that to at least prevent quite a number of "automated users" from exploiting the service.
On the other hand - the torrent-idea is also very good, as it takes most of the problems that comes with hosting such services from your shoulders and gives you way more time for other things...

As i stated before...i am very thankful for your offer and don´t want to be seen as someone not appreciating this...but i also want to throw my ideas on how to even improve that for both sides...

[Letterbox]

And there it goes...server down due to overload by mischievous individuals....

Whilst i understand your anger about this persons, i do have to ask again, why don´t you use an account-system with free registration + captcha during that to at least prevent quite a number of "automated users" from exploiting the service.
On the other hand - the torrent-idea is also very good, as it takes most of the problems that comes with hosting such services from your shoulders and gives you way more time for other things...

As i stated before...i am very thankful for your offer and don´t want to be seen as someone not appreciating this...but i also want to throw my ideas on how to even improve that for both sides...

Thank you for the suggestion, I am looking into right now and further measures. Its just unfortunate a few people want to behave like this, ruining it for everyone else.
JP

[Letterbox]

And there it goes...server down due to overload by mischievous individuals....

Whilst i understand your anger about this persons, i do have to ask again, why don´t you use an account-system with free registration + captcha during that to at least prevent quite a number of "automated users" from exploiting the service.
On the other hand - the torrent-idea is also very good, as it takes most of the problems that comes with hosting such services from your shoulders and gives you way more time for other things...

As i stated before...i am very thankful for your offer and don´t want to be seen as someone not appreciating this...but i also want to throw my ideas on how to even improve that for both sides...

Thank you for the suggestion, I am looking into right now and further measures. Its just unfortunate a few people want to behave like this, ruining it for everyone else.
JP

[Rez007]

First off, I just want to say thanks for taking such a proactive stance on this issue. I like how you posted the companies/location that were causing the problem. You and others spent way too much time and hard work for a couple of people to ruin it. I read a post you made earlier (I belive on a different site) that you can only block countries but not individual IPs. If that is the case...why not? At least temporarily. The Softimage user base is not really that large, while some honest individuals might get affected; I think it might still be for the greater good. I would say it is better to go that route than have everyone affected, and especially you and the others who worked hard on it. Sometimes running a business you have to choose the "lesser of the greater evils," instead of trying to make everyone happy, which I am sure you know. In this case I think blocking the countries for the time being that are giving you the issue is better than shutting the whole thing down. Contacting those companies and asking them to stop, I think is a long shot.
Let’s face the truth; most legal licenses of software are purchased in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and others...not usually the locations that you mentioned on your site. I was on a CG architectural site last night reading an on going post about what people charge for still images of Architectural Viz. The posts were very informative and shocking. One individual said that he gets paid $3.00/hr and that a company does not pay for their licenses, and they charge roughly $200.00 an image. What??? Unfortunately, we are now in a global economy and the industry is getting killed by practices like these. It sucks for the people that actually pay for their licenses, and do everything 100 percent legitimate.
You might be wondering why I went off on a tangent like I did…it is because I believe that what is going on here is part of a larger issue all together, and I feel that this training that you and Autodesk are providing for us is vital and graciously appreciated. Blocking them might be a small wake-up call for those countries. To lose a couple of people temporarily that most likely are doing illegal practices, is a lot better than affecting the majority of honest-hard working individuals.

[Letterbox]

First off, I just want to say thanks for taking such a proactive stance on this issue. I like how you posted the companies/location that were causing the problem. You and others spent way too much time and hard work for a couple of people to ruin it. I read a post you made earlier (I belive on a different site) that you can only block countries but not individual IPs. If that is the case...why not? At least temporarily. The Softimage user base is not really that large, while some honest individuals might get affected; I think it might still be for the greater good. I would say it is better to go that route than have everyone affected, and especially you and the others who worked hard on it. Sometimes running a business you have to choose the "lesser of the greater evils," instead of trying to make everyone happy, which I am sure you know. In this case I think blocking the countries for the time being that are giving you the issue is better than shutting the whole thing down. Contacting those companies and asking them to stop, I think is a long shot.
Let’s face the truth; most legal licenses of software are purchased in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and others...not usually the locations that you mentioned on your site. I was on a CG architectural site last night reading an on going post about what people charge for still images of Architectural Viz. The posts were very informative and shocking. One individual said that he gets paid $3.00/hr and that a company does not pay for their licenses, and they charge roughly $200.00 an image. What??? Unfortunately, we are now in a global economy and the industry is getting killed by practices like these. It sucks for the people that actually pay for their licenses, and do everything 100 percent legitimate.
You might be wondering why I went off on a tangent like I did…it is because I believe that what is going on here is part of a larger issue all together, and I feel that this training that you and Autodesk are providing for us is vital and graciously appreciated. Blocking them might be a small wake-up call for those countries. To lose a couple of people temporarily that most likely are doing illegal practices, is a lot better than affecting the majority of honest-hard working individuals.

Thank you for posting one of the most intelligent and researched posts. Your right there is a very large group of people that are only getting $3/hr. In fact in India $300 a month is a good salary. But you know education is important as in some ways for many people in those countries education is the only way to get $300 a month. So we'd also like to help those go from $1 day to something better. Because change is made in small steps.

Its also the reason and part of a bigger issue as you mention that we dont use bit-torrent, as the mpaa & riaa, no longer sue individuals but now only deal with isp's. See Irelands & the UK minister who have 'reversed' decision's to support the industries 3 strikes and no more internet. Now isp's are tracking such access and collecting data that these users are 'problem users' and there are not interested if its legal content, guilty by use. There is no point denying it, or arguing it, That's the way it is. Thats why we dont do it - it paints a target on your back.

It does suck that legal users get hammered in the global economy as the problem is now with email voip and instant messaging, extremely easy for companies to send work overseas. There is one fact i can tell you there are lots of people out there who promise the earth but just cant deliver. How do i know, Letterbox has in the past hired many freelancers from many countries, and I've been told initially it was a massive learning process. That will put many off from doing this. But for larger the economic savings are far too great a temptation to resist. I can also say when we required written proof of legal licenses many people disappeared from view. Countered with Fusion's possibly largest single customer (1000 lic) is also in India. So you see the situation is not always as black and white as one thinks.

Unfortunately on the technical side because of the way the internet was build and grew very rapidly, the possibility of blocking a single person is very difficult, ip's being dynamic, but the telecommunications company's that supply bandwidth get allocations of ip, so that makes it some what easier, but again with companies owning companies the and the ip pool becoming larger it again makes it extremely hard to block. One's only real alternative is to block a country, which is severe, but as maybe you now get its the only choice open. IP blocking on the server end was possible but the apache (web server) mod that did this is no longer supported which means that individuals have to write their own. I'll admit that is beyond my scope of learning.

Terry did post in the past (before I took over from him on this side of things) on many different forums, from China, Korea, Russia and Singapore. But thats a very time consuming business, and it would be nice if (see above) if other people could help in this, after all many hands make light work.

Interesting it seems (more often when its a bad day) that people, are not interested in getting involved, nor willing to do anything , apart from download or complain. eg ..I'm happy to take the material, but i cant be bothered to help. I know people will say i dont have time, that may well be true, but just for fun I'll quote Steven - 'no time - turn the tv off - now you do'.

Interestingly the difference when we gave business's early access, ...nothing... like this happened, I personally sent to them all, all over the world.

But we are doing what we can, we have written to both of those companies, I personally have looked and are actvely investigating many solutions, but my time is also limited - and the longer Redi-Vivus stays down the more people complain. But we cannot, I mean that cannot let the server get hit like that again, because then we get nasty email's saying wft. Before you say it - for the last few month i have watched little to no tv, but its supposed to be a community, so a little help or encouragement does goes a long way.

John-Pierre (JP)

[Jim]

Sorry I am new to the community here, so I don't have a full grasp of the situation. As I understand it, you guys have been very generous and developed some top notch video tutorials for Softimage. You provide them free of charge, but your servers seem to have been abused by some people and overloaded the servers?

I read your last post here but I don't know what the MPAA & RIAA have to do with your situation, I'm sorry I wasn't able to make the connection. Am I correct in understanding that your stance against using bittorrent to distribute the files is that users who may have pirated copies of Softimage may view the files and learn the software?

You also commented on the number of people complaining and not willing to help. I hope you didn't take the suggestions of trying other things such as bittorrent or the login method as complaints... They are simply users trying to offer solutions to problems. Possibly like me, maybe they don't fully understand the problem. I take it you are offended by the bittorrent suggestion as you ignored suggestions of it until your final reply here, but I hope you understand they are only people trying to offer helpful suggestions.

If the idea is to get the video out there to everyone who would like to learn from them without overloading your server, bittorrent just seems logical and is likely why it was suggested. If the idea is to be selective about who has access to the videos then that is understandable. I think everyone in this topic for the most part was trying simply to be helpful here. Suggesting bittorrent is not an attack or complaint.

[Letterbox]

Sorry I am new to the community here, so I don't have a full grasp of the situation. As I understand it, you guys have been very generous and developed some top notch video tutorials for Softimage. You provide them free of charge, but your servers seem to have been abused by some people and overloaded the servers?

I read your last post here but I don't know what the MPAA & RIAA have to do with your situation, I'm sorry I wasn't able to make the connection. Am I correct in understanding that your stance against using bittorrent to distribute the files is that users who may have pirated copies of Softimage may view the files and learn the software?

You also commented on the number of people complaining and not willing to help. I hope you didn't take the suggestions of trying other things such as bittorrent or the login method as complaints... They are simply users trying to offer solutions to problems. Possibly like me, maybe they don't fully understand the problem. I take it you are offended by the bittorrent suggestion as you ignored suggestions of it until your final reply here, but I hope you understand they are only people trying to offer helpful suggestions.

If the idea is to get the video out there to everyone who would like to learn from them without overloading your server, bittorrent just seems logical and is likely why it was suggested. If the idea is to be selective about who has access to the videos then that is understandable. I think everyone in this topic for the most part was trying simply to be helpful here. Suggesting bittorrent is not an attack or complaint.

I dont take the suggestion of 'use bittorrent' as a complaint, far from it, its a constructive suggest.
That's why I explained why bittorrent is not a good a solution as people think.

Let me make it clearer...

mpaa +riaa dont deal with users only isp's... ok
mpaa +riaa say to isp's people download pirate stuff, via bittorrent ... ok
isp therefore anyone who downloads via bittorrent = guilty.
you download (whatever, legal or no) using bittorrent... your flagged.

The right and wrongs of it, another time another place... thats what happens. Google uk minister, ireland isp bittorrent etc etc.

JP

[Jim]

Let me make it clearer...

mpaa +riaa dont deal with users only isp's... ok
mpaa +riaa say to isp's people download pirate stuff, via bittorrent ... ok
isp therefore anyone who downloads via bittorrent = guilty.
you download (whatever, legal or no) using bittorrent... your flagged.

The right and wrongs of it, another time another place... thats what happens. Google uk minister, ireland isp bittorrent etc etc.

JP

Interesting. That's not how it works in Canada, I didn't know that's how it worked elsewhere.

[Letterbox]

Let me make it clearer...

mpaa +riaa dont deal with users only isp's... ok
mpaa +riaa say to isp's people download pirate stuff, via bittorrent ... ok
isp therefore anyone who downloads via bittorrent = guilty.
you download (whatever, legal or no) using bittorrent... your flagged.

The right and wrongs of it, another time another place... thats what happens. Google uk minister, ireland isp bittorrent etc etc.

JP

Interesting. That's not how it works in Canada, I didn't know that's how it worked elsewhere.

Jim... do you connect via any of these? .. not getting the high speed you used to???

Bell Sympatico
Delta Cable
Rogers
Shaw Cable
Cogeco
EastLink
Xplornet

JP

[Jim]

Shaw yes. Are you suggesting that is how it works here? I personally don't use bittorrent, but have friends who do, and they don't complain about download speeds.

[Rez007]

Thank you for posting one of the most intelligent and researched posts. Your right there is a very large group of people that are only getting $3/hr. In fact in India $300 a month is a good salary. But you know education is important as in some ways for many people in those countries education is the only way to get $300 a month. So we'd also like to help those go from $1 day to something better. Because change is made in small steps.

Its also the reason and part of a bigger issue as you mention that we dont use bit-torrent, as the mpaa & riaa, no longer sue individuals but now only deal with isp's. See Irelands & the UK minister who have 'reversed' decision's to support the industries 3 strikes and no more internet. Now isp's are tracking such access and collecting data that these users are 'problem users' and there are not interested if its legal content, guilty by use. There is no point denying it, or arguing it, That's the way it is. Thats why we dont do it - it paints a target on your back.

It does suck that legal users get hammered in the global economy as the problem is now with email voip and instant messaging, extremely easy for companies to send work overseas. There is one fact i can tell you there are lots of people out there who promise the earth but just cant deliver. How do i know, Letterbox has in the past hired many freelancers from many countries, and I've been told initially it was a massive learning process. That will put many off from doing this. But for larger the economic savings are far too great a temptation to resist. I can also say when we required written proof of legal licenses many people disappeared from view. Countered with Fusion's possibly largest single customer (1000 lic) is also in India. So you see the situation is not always as black and white as one thinks.

Unfortunately on the technical side because of the way the internet was build and grew very rapidly, the possibility of blocking a single person is very difficult, ip's being dynamic, but the telecommunications company's that supply bandwidth get allocations of ip, so that makes it some what easier, but again with companies owning companies the and the ip pool becoming larger it again makes it extremely hard to block. One's only real alternative is to block a country, which is severe, but as maybe you now get its the only choice open. IP blocking on the server end was possible but the apache (web server) mod that did this is no longer supported which means that individuals have to write their own. I'll admit that is beyond my scope of learning.

Terry did post in the past (before I took over from him on this side of things) on many different forums, from China, Korea, Russia and Singapore. But thats a very time consuming business, and it would be nice if (see above) if other people could help in this, after all many hands make light work.

Interesting it seems (more often when its a bad day) that people, are not interested in getting involved, nor willing to do anything , apart from download or complain. eg ..I'm happy to take the material, but i cant be bothered to help. I know people will say i dont have time, that may well be true, but just for fun I'll quote Steven - 'no time - turn the tv off - now you do'.

Interestingly the difference when we gave business's early access, ...nothing... like this happened, I personally sent to them all, all over the world.

But we are doing what we can, we have written to both of those companies, I personally have looked and are actvely investigating many solutions, but my time is also limited - and the longer Redi-Vivus stays down the more people complain. But we cannot, I mean that cannot let the server get hit like that again, because then we get nasty email's saying wft. Before you say it - for the last few month i have watched little to no tv, but its supposed to be a community, so a little help or encouragement does goes a long way.

John-Pierre (JP)

Hi JP,

Thanks for the informative response to my post. Firstly, my solution was a mere temporary fix. I figured this way the training material could at least get out to the vast majority of honest users in the first month, and by the time the second or so month comes along, the material would have been greatly distributed already. Now, I don’t know the ratio of “hits” that these two companies did to your server vs. the honest downloads. So, reopening all of the downloads to everyone after the first couple of months, might still be an issue when these dishonest people start hitting the sever again.

I fully agree with you that all people should have the chance to educate themselves in order to better their personal well being…I have nothing against that, what does bother me though are the ones that do it illegally for the betterment of themselves while the honest ones suffer. So, like I mentioned in the earlier post you have a couple of honest people suffer at the beginning rather than the whole.

I think your decision to refrain from using bit-torrents is a very good idea, especially in terms of you distributing the material, and treating yourself and LetterBox, as a business. It is best not to get associated with those methods even though you are doing it for an honest purpose.

As for people helping you guys out, you are right…most people want the material, but when the “crap hits the fan” you will be hard-pressed to find a legitimate solution from outside sources. I can not program worth a lick, so I would not be able to help you in the tech area, such as, writing code to block the countries. However, my best friend is a very good programmer, so I am going to ask him if that is something that is relatively easy to do or not. While, I cant promise that he will have time to whip something up, I will let you know if he does, and at that point you can decide if it is something that you wish to use or not. To be up front, he mostly likely won’t have the time to do it, but it never hurts to ask.

I also think that if this community and/or other communities, relative to the CG industry, would start some sort of “blacklist” site or forum thread, it would be nice to add dishonest companies that participate in illegal practices to that list. It would kind of be like a quick reference to show which companies to stay away from, which in turn, might slowly help out the industry.

Anyway, if I think of a solution to the main problem at hand I will post it here. I was one of the fortunate people to be able to download and view all of the tutorials that were available so far, and let me tell you…they were very informative. I feel like a better Softimage user already. Thanks again to you and your team for the hard work. I hope to see you guys up and running again soon.

Best of Luck!

[Rez007]

I just had an idea that popped into my head after writing my last post. Now, I don’t know if this might have been mentioned already on a different forum, nor would I have any idea of the advantages/disadvantages that this might have…since I don’t program, I am kind of shooting in the dark here. Anyway here is my idea...

What if you setup a user login system, where people have to login with a User ID and Password? The user would have to share basic information like: Name, Location, Etc. The downloads would be privately held, and you could decide which accounts get accepted or not accepted. This would be kind of like how you might have done it when you asked/gave private companies first crack at the downloads, like you mentioned in your previous post. Also, you could have the acceptance be automated from the start, and then keep track of which users exceed their download via their User ID. At that point, you can ban the user(s) account that are giving you trouble. Sure the banned user can always request a new account via an alias, but after a certain amount of bans, they might get the hint. Anyway, that is just a suggestion and I have now idea of how easy it would be to implement something like this or how well it might work.

[calmasacow]

Actually the use of bit-torrent has been upheld in US Federal court as a Legitimate use file distribution system. Comcast and Verizon have both lost cases where they ordered to stop the limiting and blocking of Bit-Torrent traffic.

The RIAA and MPAA going after ISPs is a different thing altogether. This is because to date in the US the RIAA still has not won a case.

You make all of these cases against Bit torrent that it is a pirating platform but then you move all of the content to file downloading service that prolly 90% of the files on their servers are pirated materials. That is a bit Sideways if ask me. Bit torrent is used by many large corporations as well as some US government agencies