Caveat emptor! Pandemic, Streaming Services, and Scams

This pandemic forced many of us to stay home. It won't be long when indoors before you start looking for ways to fend off boredom. The easiest way to do that is to avail of video and music streaming services. Youtube has both video and music but it is riddled with ads. For truly premium, uninterrupted visual and aural feast you have Netflix and Spotify. But they will cost you.

So come the services that promise to provide long-term (annual) HD Netflix and Premium Spotify accounts for the price of coffee. Just search in Facebook Marketplace for sellers of such accounts.Use search terms like Netflix Buy&Sell Accounts or Netflix Premium Accounts.

But they normally use a group account to avail of the lower fees per subscriber. For example Netflix's Premium account costs P549 for 5 user profiles (4 screens watching at a time). Effectively, each user will just cost P137.25 per month. If they can pass this for P150-P200, then they have profits ranging from P51-P251 per group account. 

The same modus applies to Premium Spotify which costs just P194 for up to 6 accounts. They resell for P100 for three months. And Premium Spotify is free for the first three months. Do the math to know their profits.

But how legit are they?

Netflix and Spotify (and the other services as well) view the master accounts as legit. They got their money after all. It is the downstream reselling that can be problematic.

I tell you, you will get your account. You will be able to use it for as long as these 'resellers' wish. After all, they control the master account which determines the sub-accounts under them as in Spotify, or the master password, as in Netflix. There is nothing that prevents these 'resellers' from cancelling your sub-account and reselling it again.

Caveat emptor!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The best and the brightest ....

Let’s pray for our government officials. Panalangin din po natin ang mga namumuno na best and brightest.

I do not claim that the photos are that of officials of the government. The photos can be easily found in the Internet and are just symbolisms. They are symbols of somebody who is part of the best and the brightest in the government.

Photo credits:
http://thesplendorofthechurch.com
http://www.manilaspeak.com
http://kisa2000.yolasite.com 
http://www.twitter.com

Another one bites the dust....RIP Extratorrent!

Be smart, back up!

Smart, mtbf, mttf, afr, argh*. These are just a few of the acronyms that pertain to hard disk failure. A systems manager might be forgiven for not knowing what these really mean, but ignoring the tell-tale signs is not smart and will lead to a shorter mean time between failures (mtbf) and mean time to failures (mttf).

Manufacturers made a smart acronym for self-monitoring, analysis and reporting technology. Smart (the technology) enables the monitoring of important parameters, and, thus, early detection of a coming hard disk failure. The smart systems manager heeds the warnings.

The mtbf indicates the expected operating time between two consecutive failures in hours. The mtbf considers the life cycle of a device that fails repeatedly, is repaired and returned to service again.  The mttf indicates the expected operating time until the failure of a device expressed in hours. Mtbf and mttf are almost synonymous in usage. Sometimes mtbf refers to mean time before failure. Afr (annualized failure rate) on the other hand, is the percentage failure share of a certain amount of hard disks, which is extrapolated to one year based on expectation values.

Manufacturers advertise server-type hard disks to have an mtbf of more than 1.2 million hours. One year is 8,760 hours, so are server-type hard disks expected to last 138 years (just a little more than 137 actually, but I love the number 138)? Not really, statistics and experience do not support that. Specially in servers not housed in climate controlled environments, and much more so in servers that has warned you via smart, and much, much more so, if there was a recent crash in the same array.

So why do manufacturers claim mtbfs that big? Do they claim that their hard disks can operate for 138 years? No. Conversely, they may claim that 138 hard drives could be operated for a year and only one failure could be expected. Much more realistic, isn't it?

The most expensive hardware and the most redundant raid configuration won't mean a thing if you lose precious data. So be smart, back up, heed the signs, and own up if you lose data. The hard disks wouldn't say “I told you so!” even if they actually did.

*argh - (not an acronym) expression of frustration, annoyance, dismay, embarrassment and anger