There are some people in this world for whom I question their mental capacity. But I digress, I will endeaver to stick to the facts and let you draw your own conclusions.

The partial logfile that I look at now, represents a time period between:
26/Dec/2004:23:49:36 - 27/Dec/2004:09:26:30

During this period, a user with IP: 67.175.213.39 downloaded directly the BeOS_Java_Christmas.avi file more than 500 times.

The day before, I had kept an eye on how many hits to our site we were getting, bandwidth used, etc, via our stats page. Normally when OSNews links to our site, we do notice a significant upswing in traffic, but at that point, it was merely 8 GB over a days worth of usage. Not an issue, I thought. I went to sleep, content knowing that we were sharing some nice news with the community, and I had no cause for concern regarding bandwidth. Or so I thought.

When I noticed that our updated bandwidth usage was 123 GB, I immediately deleted the avi file. I did this action on Dec 27, at about 0400 GMT, when I was observing the bandwidth usage of the previous day. ("checking in", so to speak.)

What this boils down to is Haiku News is now responsible for overage bandwidth charges at a rate of 2.5 cents per megabyte, which in this case works out to roughly $640 USD. We don't have this kind of money just lying around.

I have started consultations with our webhost, Hurricane Electric (great people, I love 'em) and I am composing an email for the netblock owner of that offending IP. I would welcome any and all suggestions from you as well, for at this point, I do not know what the future brings for Haiku News.