Information Valuation - The Most Buck for the Bits? 506
Rational asks: "I've heard of Everquest accounts sold for upwards of a thousand dollars... Considering that what is actually for sale is just an username and password, which generally comes up to less than 20 bytes in total, this amounts to over $50 per byte. What are the most expensive pieces of information that you have heard of, in dollars per byte? Perhaps satellite pictures? The Human genome?"
Goat Sex (Score:5, Funny)
Goats on Venus? (Score:3, Interesting)
They also sent back most of the first picture from the Moon after several failures and had the sender die partway through the image, using earlier, perhaps therefore costlier technology, but OTOH also had a bathtub rover (Lunakhod) up there running around for years taking holiday snaps.
Either project covers a lot of goats, a lot of sex, or both.
I don't know how you bitify handwriting, but the Yanks spent a bazillion dollars developing a pen that worked in vacuum at any temperature. The Russians used a pencil.
Re:Goats on Venus? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Goat Sex (Score:3, Funny)
Credit Card Numbers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Credit Card Numbers (Score:2)
Re:Credit Card Numbers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Credit Card Numbers (Score:3, Funny)
When I was in college, I worked for First Data corporation as a translator for international credit card transactions. One afternoon my coworker, Ahshif, waves across the cubicle at me to jack in on his line and listen to the transaction.
This Saudi kid is putting a two million dollar transaction on his Visa card! Ahshif is translating between the merchant and the credit card's bank when the bank asks, "What's this purchase for?"
"Well," the merchant replies, "I'm selling him seven Rolls-Royces. Five are for a charity auction, one is for his father, and one is for himself."
I'll never understand the rich, I guess.
Re:Credit Card Numbers (Score:2)
Technically, no. You get an unlimited card before you get one limited that high. The highest limited card is probably about a hundred grand...
Data (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Data (Score:2, Insightful)
yrs,
Ephemeriis
Re:Data (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Data (Score:3, Insightful)
DennyK
Re:Data (Score:2)
Re:Data (Score:3, Informative)
$1G/B (Score:2, Funny)
I had to pay $4G for changing only 4 bytes of my bank account state, that's $1G/B!
Business.com domain name (Score:2, Interesting)
The most value has got to be in passwords... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The most value has got to be in passwords... (Score:2)
Re:The most value has got to be in passwords... (Score:2)
But I'm probably being too optimistic.
Re:The most value has got to be in passwords... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The most value has got to be in passwords... (Score:2)
B-O-O-Z-E
Dont know whether I would put a price to it (Score:2, Funny)
Karmack ?! Why are you wasting your time reading my post ???!!!
Umm... (Score:2)
So are we talking about data, or short-form representations of it?
Re:Umm... (Score:2)
So the per-byte cost is probably not very good in this case.
The real per-byte value would probably be some online email/data to get at a meatworld commodity- insider stock information or location of drug stashes would be good examples.
Slashdot accounts (Score:2)
Re:Slashdot accounts (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Slashdot accounts (Score:2)
Battle Estimate 93K (Score:2)
Slightly misleading calculation (Score:2)
Of course that's not what is for sale. What is sold is the information stored on the EQ servers that defines the character. The username/password are just what let you get at the character data. When I bought my house the transaction resulted in a key, but I can assure you that's not what I paid more than half a million dollars for...
This doesn't negate the basic point though. I don't know how much space an EQ character takes up, but it will still probably result in a fairly impressive dollar/byte sum.
Re:Slightly misleading calculation (Score:2, Funny)
You paid $500,000+ for an Everquest House?!? Damn - I hope you got one that's at least over 1MB and has "pets" in the basement
Gwyd
Re:Slightly misleading calculation (Score:2)
Maybe... (Score:3, Funny)
The name of GWBs coke dealer from the 70's [or whenever he did it]. I bet he would pay a lot of money to suppress that info.
Information wants to be expensive (Score:2)
That's too simplistic a view. (Score:2)
In every other case it's the same. The human genome represents millions of dollars in hardware, research, man hours, etc. Sure, you can fit the resulting data into a nice little package of X bytes, but you aren't paying for the bytes.
-Adam
You are neither well-formed, nor valid.
License Keys (Score:2, Informative)
A license key is a string of maybe 30 bytes usually, and cost up to the millions of dollars.
Cost to protect (Score:2)
Or to decrypt the smallest amount of information : Enigma.
Or another question is, if someone were able to misuse some numbers, what would be the most damage they could cause? For me, I think it would be my social security number. 9 Digits. They could run up massive debt in my name. Granted, there's legal protection, but still - losing your government-issued identity is probably the worst thing that could happen to an individual, from the standpoint of protecting a small number of bits.
The most expensive number to ever calculate was of course, 42.
Wrong Comparison (Score:2)
My money would be on nuclear launch codes, although I have no idea how long they are, so I could be wrong, but holding life or death for billions in a string of numbers is pretty impressive.
Re:Wrong Comparison (Score:2)
The whole system (warhead - rocket - launch - target) can be easily secured with so many layers of encryption code (most of which is not even in the firmware most of the time, and maybe not even in the launch site computers!) that it would definitely make it easier for terr'ists just to smuggle the warhead into the target country rather than try to risk it all breaking through layers of encrypted stuff, which undoubtedly has lots of anti-debugging "trapdoors" that render it useless. For example, it is known that IFF boxes are usually fitted with a small explosive charge, and you can't open them without knowing exactly how.
Headlines. (Score:5, Insightful)
Calculate the cost of that.
--Blair
"Hint: don't just count $."
Re:Headlines. (Score:2)
That was costly, and we are still feeling the ramifications today...
Re:Headlines. (Score:5, Interesting)
United States
10% (avg) of GDP from 1941-42
37% of GDP from 1942-1945 (avg)
GDP(in billions) 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945
113.5 144.2 180.0 209.0 221.1
Defense Spending: 11.4 53.4 66.0 77.3 81.8
Total Defense: $289.6 Billion (note: roughly 1/3 of this went to the pacific theatre)
Casulties: 292 000 dead (estimating cost of lives is NOT something I am going to do)
Soviet Union
Casulties: 13.6 million armed forces, 7.7 million civilian dead (note: roughly 1/2 of those who entered service in soviet military where either killed or wounded. Estimate the cost of that!)
Note: No official records of cost of WWII to Soviet Union have ever been released (that I know of or could find). Estimates are on the order of $350 billion counting damage to infrastructure, etc.
Soviet Union (350) + US (191.1) cost: $541.1 billion. unadjusted for inflation
"We Win" = 48 bits of ASCII code. Each Bit = 11.27$ billion dollars. Rough adjustment for Australia,NZ,Britain,Canada,etc = 13.45 billion dollars/bit unadjusted for inflation
Not taking into account casulties, thousands of other unknown/unquantifiable factors.
Sources:
A war to be Won - Murray and Millet
The World At Arms - Reader's Digest (publisher
Us Gov't GDP - IRS website
On Ebay (Score:2)
Natalie Portman's phone number on Ebay....
.
.
.
.
if it ever came up for auction.
/. quick run down of expesnive info (Score:5, Funny)
Business.com (~8 bytes): $5,000,000
Natalie Portman's phone number (~9 bytes): priceless
Re:/. quick run down of expesnive info (Score:3, Funny)
Should that read 'Natalie Portman's Call Screener (~9 bytes): worthless'?
Re:/. quick run down of expesnive info (Score:2)
Not the human genome (Score:2)
Glib reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the money is being paid (presumably) for the stats and inventory of that user. So saying the 'value per byte' based on the metrics of the key is like saying that paying 1000$ for a key to a safety deposit box with 1000$ in it works out to (1000/metrics-of-key)$
So the real cost-per-byte number for these EQ accounts relates to how many bytes are in a full player record for an EQ account.
Anyhow, I'm sure some company out there has paid in the thousands for a few lines of code.
This does make me think about my 'Guiness Book of World Records That We'll Never Know' book I wish I could have. Whats the furthest a rental cars keys have ever been from its associated car, and is there an interesting story about it? You get the idea
Re:Glib reasoning (Score:2, Insightful)
I play Gemstone III [gemstone.net] by Simutronics, and know of at LEAST one person whose full time job is just selling items and characters and "coins" for real life money.
Sure, he invested a lot of his time into the game initially, but he makes enough to support himself on it, so that's gotta say something...
it must be.... (Score:2, Funny)
RSA labs... (Score:2)
How about the RSA factoring challenge [rsasecurity.com]? The biggest prize is $200,000 for the 2048 bit key (256 bytes). That makes it about $781 per byte.
enigma (Score:3, Insightful)
Even more importantly - look at WWII German Enigma codes - the decoding of any one single message was certainly valuable, but understanding how to decode it was invaluable. Like life - power is knowledge, and understanding is inferring knowledge where before there was none (read: understanding creates power).
cheers
Re:enigma (Score:2, Funny)
Re:enigma (Score:2)
Teach a man to fish, and you lose your monopoly on fishing.
Re:enigma (Score:3, Interesting)
Neil Stephenson makes good light of your first point in Cryptonomicon (ie. detachment 2703+1), and certainly your second is adamantly indicated by Sun Tzu's fundamentals. Who am I to disagree?
However, I would hazard that one could permit the definition of invaluable (valuable beyond estimation) for Enigma insofar as it provided options to the Allies that would not have otherwise been available. I am not qualified to answer that authoritatively, but certainly Stephenson's fictional history indicates this to be permissible, if not appropriate.
"The Eagle has Landed" or credi cards? (Score:2)
On credit card transactions, the actual transaction is what's being purchased. The bank actually purchases the transaction from the merchant. They then sell it to Visa, Who sells it to the Issuing bank who then charges the person's account. It's odd, but that's actually how it works. And since some people buy houses (and corporations buy inventories) with a single credit card transaction, that's a lock of buck for the byte.
X-10 (Score:2)
Re:X-10 (Score:2)
Oh, right, creative billing. A true contractor.
Brand Naming (Score:3, Interesting)
This article, The Name Game [salon.com] cites these firms charging around $75,000 for a single word that may only be seven letters long. Not a logo, not an ad campaign, not even a domain registration, just the single word. I guess this runs roughly around $10,000 per byte.
Re:Brand Naming (Score:5, Funny)
Some years ago, a friend of mine did a logo for a BIG company. The logo looks like a head with an ellipse going though it. It came about in a totally unrelated office, er, "event" (everyone was drunk) when someone was clowning and put an old UHF TV antenna around a bust of Lenin. Voilà, instant multi hundreds$$$$ logo.
The hard part was then writing up all the bullshit to "explain" the newfangled logo...
Re:Brand Naming (Score:5, Interesting)
Nike
Coke
McDonalds
You could burn every single physical asset of these companies. Kill all the staff. And you would still only have dented the market value of the company - these companies are brand led. (ISBN 0-00-653040-0 for lots of juice).
It's the word 'NIKE' and the tick logo that ALL the value resides in - because people associate THOSE with the Nike values. You don't need the big marketing plan, brand bible etc... for that - all of those can be reworked. Whats of value is the existing brand loyalty and awareness.
you're not buying a password. (Score:2)
It's like a server.. You can '0wn' a server by having the root password (or access as root), but you don't actually _own_ it.. The real owner can just pull the plug, and mount the hd somewhere else to change the password.
Most expensive data ? (Score:2)
Now thinking about how a proper reference monitor could have been implemented in outlook to completely avoid this worm and all the others, and how these implementations are often just a few hundred lines of code - I vote for the "missing reference monitor" in Outlook to be the most expensive *missing* data out there
(See TCSEC [ncsc.mil] for a description of the reference monitor concept, if you don't know about it)
"I do" (Score:2, Funny)
S
Wolfram's 3-4 Lines of Code (Score:2)
From Steven Levy's recent Wired article [wired.com]:
"I've got to ask you," I say. "How long do you envision this rule of the universe to be?"
"I'm guessing it's really very short."
"Like how long?"
"I don't know. In Mathematica, for example, perhaps three, four lines of code."
"Four lines of code?"
"That's what I'm guessing..."
Stupid idea (Score:2)
$20K a year to subscribe to this site (Score:2)
Windows NT clients (Score:2)
divide by Afghanistan (Score:3, Interesting)
raw memory prices .... (Score:2)
Trials, business decisions (Score:2)
It is debatable whether these really are paying for just one bit - the OJ trial produced lots of public information, and the yes/no business descisions undoubtedly come with heafty reports explaining how the result was arrived at.
A test is to imagine an oracle that will (with known 100% accuracy) answer a question like 'If OJ goes to trial for murder, will he be found guilty?' If this result would be considered a sufficient substitute for actually holding the trial, then all those millions were indeed spent on one bit.
Human genome project doesn't come close (Score:3, Informative)
It cost about US $300 million. The project cost of 3 bil, bandied about, is the amount we expect to spend in the period from about 1990 to 2005 (reference, search page for "billion" [mit.edu]) on projects related to Genomics, which is the study of biological sequences, not just the human genome but a wealth of other information (including information about protein structures and the like - I generated four gigs of analytical information just this afternoon.)
Regardless, if you say that the fruit of the $300 million spent directly on the human genome is ONLY the human genome, and not all of the other data (such as correlations with other genomes which is what I was evaluating today, or the information about the number of genes, etc.) it still works out to about $US 0.40 a byte (300 bil over 750 MB). Dear, but not even in the running for most expensive data ever.
A pricing problem - do you pay for the source code, or the binary? If you're paying for the source code, I'm sure somebody, sometime, charged a full years salary to develop a Perl program 70 or 80 ASCII characters long. It could run hundreds of dollars a byte, easy.
US Nuclear Launch Codes (Score:2)
The launch codes that enable the president to launch a nuclear attack could probably be considered the most valuable "password" ever.
Re:US Nuclear Launch Codes (Score:2)
You never saw War Games, did you ?
There are no launch codes. (Score:2)
It has to be this way. Otherwise disabling the American nuclear arsenal would be as easy as killing the handful of people who have the codes, or even just blocking their communications.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:There are no launch codes. (Score:2)
A few handfulls of minions and an evil genious. (Realistically though, I doubt the person would have to be much of a genious - basic knowledge of "mass" psycohology would go a long way).
And so what? We place trust in the hands of single persons and trust that they do their duties. In the end we're all dead anyway.
Re:There are no launch codes. (Score:2)
Re:There are no launch codes. (Score:2)
Think man! If there is a communication method that can be jammed, the enemy only has to jam it to completely disable the entire fleet! No way!
What if all the command centers in the US were destroyed before anyone knew what happened? The sub commanders would just sit around because they didnt get the codes?
Most expensive bit ever. (Score:2, Interesting)
"Its a girl..." x 2 (Score:2)
Priceless source code (Score:2)
Slashdot (Score:2)
There's two really expensive bytes. Just consider all the lost productivity. Oh the humanity...
--
Hint for moderators: laugh or don't laugh. not a troll.
Most expensive--URL? (Score:2, Interesting)
DMCA (unfortunately) (Score:2, Funny)
If you consider how much the entertainment industry paid for the DMCA, it could easily be the most expensive 4 byte sequence there is. Say, for example, that $5 million was paid for it...this would come out to $1.25 million per byte, or $156250 per bit. (Note that I'm not trying to be a troll here. Depending on what angle you look at it from, there could be a certain degree of truth to what I just said, as sad as it may be.)
css keys (Score:2)
And remember, the keys themselves have value as art.
OT: Information in Money (Score:2)
I don't believe in a conspiracy here, but that's a pretty strange coincedence. A friend refers to it as evidence of a higher power.
"Yes" (Score:2)
Disingenuity of description (Score:2)
It's interesting to think about the value that such things have. Essentially, the value lies, as I said, in the particular formation of data on Verant's servers, in San Diego (or wherever the actual machines happen to be, due to colocation). If you had actual physical access to those machines, you could simply create the data to be whatever you want -- a level 60 Barbarian Warrior with the best gear in the game, for example.
However, physical access to the data substrate is not feasible, for a variety of reasons. Only trusted employees are allowed physical access to that areas. Brute force may give you temporary physical access, but the variety of law enforcement agencies blanketing our society would (on average) put the kibosh on that fairly quickly. As a result, the only plausible way to create the data the way you want, is to use the relatively public interface mechanisms Verant provides -- namely, the game interface itself.
The amount of time and effort it takes, using that interface, to get the data into the form you want, is why the data has that value. A bad Verant employee with legitimate access to the data might also be able to create such value by quickly creating characters with such data, but they are unlikely to go long without getting caught.
Yeah, this all may seem fairly obvious, but did you ever actually sit down and think it through before? I didn't think so ;)
00101010 (Score:3, Funny)
Verisign's signing key (Score:2)
Sun's Source Code (Score:2)
That might not work out to be more on a per-byte basis than the Everquest account, but try amassing 80,000 Everquest accounts worth one grand apiece.
$10,000 for one bit (of chalk) (Score:5, Funny)
I've heard various versions of this story over the years, but the best link I can find attributes it to a General Electric engineer named Charles Steinmetz (1865-1923):
One day a whole roomful of General Electric's most expensive machinery went out of order. By this time Steinmetz had retired, but the company's baffled engineers called him back as a consultant. Steinmetz ambled from machine to machine, taking a measurement here, scribbling something in his noteboook there. After about an hour, he took out a large piece of chalk and marked a large 'X' on the casing of one machine. Workers pried off the casing and found the problem at once.
When the company executives got Steinmetz's bill for $10,000, they were reluctant to pay it. "This seems a bit excessive for one chalk mark," Steinmetz was told. "Perhaps you'd better itemize your charges."
Within a few days, they received the following itemized bill:
Making one chalk mark $1.00
Knowing where to make one chalk mark $9,999.00
setuid bit (Score:3, Interesting)
Just a couple set-uid bits here and there made the Internet Worm possible.
Re:By that logic I bought an expensive key... (Score:2, Insightful)
To extend your analogy, it's like getting the house built on your land with the option to tear it down if you don't want to pay for the keys.
No, you don't get the character file. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oil field bids (Score:2)
Re:The Meaning Of It All (Score:2)
Actually, it is 0 bits, if the answer (42) is correct, and the question is known. This is because any other "Deep Thought" box can provide this answer without access to the number 42 before or during computations. That's basic theory of information. Also, the answer "is it day or night" at a random time carries 1 bit of information; the same answer only during the day carries 0 bits.
Re:The Meaning Of It All (Score:2)
This information is invaluable. More specifically, this equates to [FPE Exception: Divide by Zero] in USD per byte!
Re:Go / No-go on a new drug (Score:3, Funny)
1/0
depending on the issue and the senator, it's a few tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. but don't be fooled, they're all for sale.