Those Facebook Q4 results

At the time of writing, Facebook is down about 3.5% in after-hours trading, bouncing up and down as investors try to work out how they feel about the FB Q4 2012 results. I've had a look through, and can sympathise - I can't make my mind up either.

The main takeaway I get from the FB results is that revenue is up, $5.1bn for 2012 compared to $3.7bn for 2011, but it's costing them a lot more to get that revenue; costs of $4.5bn were much greater than $2bn last year. From the breakdown, cost of revenue was proportionately slightly down, but marketing + sales and "general admin" way more than doubled from 2011 to 2012, and R+D at $1.3bn was up by a factor of 3.6, which is huge. What does Facebook buy with its R+D money? It's talent - this is almost certainly mostly compensation: salaries and share allocations. Share-based compensation expense in R+D jumped from $114mm to $843mm. They've doubtless got a lot more engineers, and they're having to pay them well in a thriving Silicon Valley market. Zuckerberg announced on the earnings call that FB intends to hire more engineers in 2013 and in 2012 added 1,419 employees to the previous 3,200 employees; nearly 50% growth already. If you're paying your average engineer $200K in salary and benefits, which seems low for Bay Area salaries, that's $280 million you've just added to your annual payroll. And the problem with adding a lot of employees is that it's a recurring cost - you can't easily shrink wages, and if you start to fire significant numbers of them then you're going to alarm the markets.

Something else I find interesting for its absence is information on how much FB is spending on building and running its data centers. Reasonably solid estimates based on power usage placed them at 180,000 servers in mid-2012, up sharply from an estimated 30,000 in 2009. That's still a lot less than Google's estimated 1 million (based on the same methodology) but it must be a serious draw in power and maintenance, not to mention capital expenditure. From a first glance through the figures though, it doesn't look like they're now spending a lot of money in that area. If you figure a single server costs you $1500 (guess) and you put, say, 20,000 in a building (I don't know if FB has 9 data centers but that sounds about right) then that's $30 million on servers plus probably twice that in associated infrastructure (say, a round $100 million per data center) and you figure on writing off that cost over 5 years, that's $180 million per year for the nine data centers.

I can understand FB putting all this money into obtaining talent - they want to find the next big thing, monetise mobile, find new markets. To keep their shareholders happy, however, they're going to need to show some impressive results fairly soon. This is not the dot.com boom any more. On the other hand, they have 600 million users using FB in some way every day; quantity has a quality all of its own.

This, obviously, is not investment advice. I have no idea what I'm doing. You'd be mad to pay any attention to me. Do your own diligence, seek out a paid professional, etc.

Caribbean warez for all

Due to a trade dispute with the USA, Antigua may be setting itself up to provide warez to US citizens for a modest fee, without actually breaking the law. The previously lucrative gambling industry ran into problems when the US enacted anti-offshore-gambling laws. Now, temporarily freed of international copyright obligations, Antigua is declaring its intention to run a business selling films and music to US citizens for profit, being able to trouser all the cash and not compensate the rights owners. Nice job if you can get it.

Bit of a problem: look at Antigua's prices for home internet. "High speed" (3Mbps) will cost you $629 East Caribbean, or about £150. Per month. Even allowing for a good bit of price gouging and monopoly abuse by Cable and Wireless, that signals a rather limited connection to "the Internet" - in this case, the key metric is the bandwidth available from Antigua to the shores of the USA. Antigua has a population of about 85,000. Let's assume 20,000 households, and 10,000 of them have an Internet connection of 1.5Mbps for about £80/month, and C+W have a contention ratio of 50:1 (so a 1.5Mbps pipe will be shared by 50 houses). Then you can satisfy domestic demand with 300Mbps of bandwidth. Double that to allow for businesses, and I reckon you're looking at just over half a gig (600Mbps) of fiber to the island. Note that this is bits per second, not bytes per second.

Downloading a movie at a reasonable rate (say, a 5Mbps stream) will quickly eat up that capacity. If you max out Antigua's entire bandwidth, you'll be able to serve 120 customers concurrently, and 2GB (bytes, not bits) of movie download will take 16,000/5 = 3200 seconds, or just under an hour. You'll be able to serve around 2900 movies per day. If you're lucky, you'll make $1/movie. You could make this work a lot better by caching popular movies States-side, but of course the copyright lawyers will shut down USA-based caching servers in no time.

Antigua will be lucky to clear $1 million in profit in the course of a year like this, even assuming no legal or infrastructure troubles. Of course, I may be off in my estimates of their available bandwidth - but I'd be surprised if I'm undershooting by a factor of 10. It also wouldn't be unimaginable for the major movie studios to pressure Internet peers to blackhole certain traffic from Antigua...

In defence of cats

The feline haters are getting organised: they now have an article in Nature Communications (registered media only) arguing that cats are merciless killers and should be put on a leash:

Cats are one of the top threats to US wildlife, killing billions of animals each year, a study suggests. The authors estimate they are responsible for the deaths of between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds and 6.9-20.7 billion mammals annually.

Well, heck, let's not do any maths on this, Rebecca Morelle from the BBC. Let's just quote the press release verbatim. Heaven forfend that we actually perform any journalism.

Being less lazy than Ms. Morelle, let us assume we have one domestic cat to every household in the USA; it's not going to be exact, but the right ballpark as many cat owners have multiple cats. That's about 100 million cats, and a buttload of wrecked next-door gardens. If they averaged 1 victim a day, that's 36 billion victims. The authors therefore are complaining about cats killing at a rate of 0.1 birds per day and, say, 0.6 mammals per day. I mean, this is not extravagant - you're talking a bird every couple of weeks. Frankly, I don't think most of these cats are trying. A cat who previously owned me used to waste 2-3 mammals and 1 bird per day, and those were only the ones whose remnants I found.

I should confess an interest at this point - I am a cat person (I wash in my own saliva) and can't stand the eager-to-please dependency of dogs. I actually appreciate cats' inclination to hunt and kill mice and rats. For that, I'm fine with them taking the occasional bird or rabbit. While we're here, I'm doubtful about the cats blamed for squirrel deaths - squirrels are nimble, wary and vicious little bastards, and it would have to be a pretty hard cat to kill squirrels successfully in any great numbers. Birds have a massive advantage over cats in being able to fly - although I'm sure the cats are working on that deficiency - and so many birds caught by cats were stupid to descend to the cat's level and likely had it coming.

To give you an idea of the angle of the article, author Pete Marra appears to work in the Migratory Bird Center of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. I'm guessing he quite likes birds. But, Pete, how many birds are there in the USA? Best guess is 10-20 billion. Life expectancy of songbirds in the USA is under a year so cats are by no means the primary killer of birds - maybe 20% of bird fatalities are due to cats. Presumably many of these are the incautious or stupid ones. We should also note how sparsely populated the USA is; there are vast swathes of land that have very few humans and even fewer cats, but plenty of birds. There's no danger of birds going extinct through cat predation.

So, Dr. Marra, where now?

Dr Marra said: "We hope that the large amount of wildlife mortality indicated by our research convinces some cat owners to keep their cats indoors and that it alerts policymakers, wildlife managers and scientists to the large magnitude of wildlife mortality caused by cat predation."

I wouldn't be surprised if this chap was a vegan, judging by the self-righteous aversion to creature mortality he displays. But no, Dr. Marra, we will not be putting bells on our cats. We will not be locking our cats in the house. We will let our cats do what they will, controlling pests and culling the weak and sick from the bird population.

And when the collapse of civilisation comes, as it surely must, Dr. Marra's most likely fate is to disappear under a pack of hungry cats intent on chewing his face off. No more than he deserves.

Spontaneous clean-out of the Civil Service?

A very promising prospect in the Grauniad today: two thirds of senior civil servants are considering quitting:

The poll (pdf), conducted by the FDA union (formerly known as the First Division Association) also found that almost one in four Whitehall staff in the top three grades of the service want to leave their jobs immediately.

To which the only response can be: "so why don't they?" The top four grades are Perm Sec (including admirals, generals, air chief marshals), Director General, Director and Deputy Director; it seems that they exclude Perm Secs from this survey. There are 35 Permanent Secretaries and 200 "top" civil servants which probably account for the Perm Secs and most of the Directors General; there are about 3500 people in the 3 grades below Perm Sec. That's 900 senior civil servants wanting to leave immediately, and 2000+ considering quitting. (The numbers also imply, if there are 150 Directors General, that the number of people in each grade multiplies by around 4 for each level below.)

But where would they go? We're in a recession, and the traditional destinations for senior civil servants (quangos, NED positions in banks, consulting firms) are being rather squeezed. I suspect that most of those wanting to leave will be angling for early retirement, hoping to get at least something of a payoff for leaving 3-5 years before their due date. And why shouldn't they? If you're in sub-average health and not anticipating a promotion, retiring early is a good plan; you take your maximum lump sum, accept the slightly reduced annuity because you don't anticipate collecting it for many years, and go off doing whatever you enjoy for the next few years. And good luck to you!

The principal benefit a company gets in hiring a senior civil servant is an inside track into the department's commercial and legal practices. If you want to negotiate the labyrinthine acquisition processes of the department in order to sell your high-priced but user-hostile software, or work out how to write documentation to ensure your pharmaceuticals get prompt approval then a senior member of the department may come in handy. However, you have to look at bang-per-buck; instead of hiring a Director, you may well be better off recruiting more junior but well-informed members of the department who are current in the practice of the rules and regulations, rather than the "big picture" guys at the top whose usefulness will quickly expire. This is not how the article sells it, of course:

According to Dave Penman, the FDA's general secretary, the survey shows that the government is facing "an exodus of talent" from the public to the private sector if the economy picks up.

I think the word "talent" does not mean what Mr. Penman thinks it means. As a career civil servant from the Inland Revenue and DWP and PCS union organiser, he's never had a job which poor performance would have put at risk. Now he's on the TUC General Council. I think it safe to say that the responsible spending of taxpayer money is not foremost on his mind.

Now, of course, we ask "cui bono?" - who wanted this story to appear and so briefed Observer investigations editor Rajeev Syal on the survey? I expect this is one step in the Civil Service angling to reverse their pay freeze. "Prime Minister, we are losing experienced senior civil servants hand over fist - we must raise pay and improve conditions to retain the hard-won experience and leadership." Since the Government doesn't seem to be able to influence Civil Service appointments as a result of the Civil Service's political "neutrality", however, all it means is that the positions will be filled by "more of the same". There is no shortage of Civil Servants willing to go for promotion boards, and the Buggin's Turn aspect of promotion ensures that "seniority" (age in place) still counts for a lot. Any board for a Top 200 position would be implicitly considering "is this person One Of Us?".

Interestingly, the current Head of the Home Civil Service, Bob Kerslake, is a mathmo from Warwick University and a chartered accountant - a break from the economics / law / Classics background of his predecessors. I wonder if he's run the numbers and realises what's coming down the pipe for Civil Service numbers, pay and pensions?

Time for the reign of clouds?

Ex-Google bod Dave Girouard writes of what business owners should consider when thinking of moving their operations into the cloud:

...one of the chief conundrums of cloud computing: you are powerless to fix a problem, and entirely dependent on somebody you can’t see, hear or yell at, to fix it. People hate that.

Girouard's perspective is interesting as he's a gamekeeper turned poacher; used to lead the Google Apps team whose entire raison d'être is cloud service hosting; he's now leading a startup and a customer of cloud services. So why does he think that a firm should host itself in the cloud?

He quotes and refutes three common arguments against cloud hosting:

1. "These big outages mean we should keep things in house"
   Most company in-house IT firms have no idea of the availability they actually provide. When you are trying to measure anything better than about three 9s (99.9% availability - fewer than 10 minutes downtime per week, or 1 in 1000 queries failing) you need to have a really good way of measuring availability from a user's point of view, which generally means several user-emulating bots probing the system and reporting on errors. The scale at which cloud hosting operates means that they have a much better idea of how close to, say, four 9s they are running at. Of course, they won't be able to measure directly any interruptions in the network between the cloud and an individual client, but they will have profiling of normal client activity and be able to spot unexpected traffic drop-off.
2. "I need somebody to talk to when a service interruption occurs"
   This is what really bugs me. When things go wrong in a company, and they will, the worst possible thing the affected workers can do is to badger the IT department with "when will it be fixed?" questions. As soon as the relevant infrastructure team recognises and acknowledges the problem, the best thing that the affected workers can do is to plan how to work around the outage, and eread the communications from the infra team that provide updated information on the scope and expected length of the outage. Repeatedly emailing or phoning to them is not going to help, no matter how diligent you wish to appear to your boss.
   One approach I've seen work well is for the infra team to designate one person to manage comms - respond to all incoming email, forward any critical information to the infra team actually solving the problem, and compose and send updates to the affected teams at designated times. The infra team may also designate a second member as a fixer-at-will to be given to affected teams for help with workarounds while the actual problem is not yet fixed.
3. "Cloud is OK for non-critical applications with non-sensitive data"
   Encryption is cheap. Encryption is (relatively) easy. Use HTTPS and only your employees and the hosting company sysadmins will be able to see your data. Encrypt critical information before sending, and the problem is solved - and as a side benefit, many fewer of your employees will have access to the secret data, if you do it correctly.

The most obvious argument against cloud is "what happens if the network between us and our cloud service provider is down / congested?" Clearly you have to be careful about your choice of ISP, and identify multiple redundant routes to your cloud service provider. This is an extra expense and hassle, but it may well still be worth it. Of course, it significantly increases the importance of building an IT department that can plan, build, measure and maintain network connectivity; this is harder to do, and harder to recruit for, than just paying Microsoft / Cisco / IBM for bundles of "enterprise" software and installing it on expensive hardware.

Girouard won't make any friends in IT with this though:

Further, this confused IT leader thinks his team can manage a service more reliably than a company whose entire existence depends on its ability to do so. To put it bluntly, Google has assembled the greatest collection of computer science talent in the world. Similarly Amazon has a multi-year lead in delivering compute power by the drop [...] Your IT organization simply doesn't rate at this level.

But it's (somewhat) true. Really good IT people don't generally stick around company IT departments very long; there are other, more tempting and lucrative gigs e.g. contracting. And if you rely on hire-at-will fire-at-will contractors for most of your IT department expertise, what exactly are your objections to cloud hosting? The number of times I've seen a single-point-of-failure IT admin depart, or threaten to depart, and leave his manager and teammates scrambling...

It will be interesting to see how the expertise profile and size of IT departments in companies migrating to cloud services will change. I expect quite a few false starts, but eventually an IT department's job (and an important one) will be focused around network connectivity rather than providing email, storage and distributed computing services.

How to run a political campaign like you want to win

The Obama campaign wrote a document "Inside the Cave" documenting their perception of the reasons that their online campaign was (unarguably) so much more successful than Romney's "Project Orca" team.

For me, the key takeaways that emerge from the presentation on why they won:

• Four times as many resources, people, targets than the GOP campaign;
• A massive focus on analytics, which the GOP apparently ignored;
• Recruiting individual credentialed tech staff rather than political wonks and entire corporations (Microsoft in the case of the GOP) for the technology campaign;
• Pitching technical jobs as undesirable ("It won't pay very well. The hours are terrible ... Most people who come to work here will take a pay cut.");
• Dynamic daily reallocation of campaigning resources based on per-state simulations;
• Daily calling of a large number of randomised voters in key states with short questionnaires to obtain data to feed the simulations;
• Tracking "persuadeability" for voter groups to determine whether it was worth trying to convince them to switch/stay with voting intent;
• Use of off-the-shelf open-source software such as R for stats analysis;
• Tracking and categorising Twitter accounts to gauge reaction to local and national political events;
• Greater online fundraising (which I don't think was a big deal - the campaign was going to spend money whether or not it had it, since it would backstopped by the major unions and private contributors);
• Using the mail subject line "Hey" (which I'd bin out of hand, but then I wasn't a USA election voter...)
• Invoking Michelle Obama's name in an email would reduce the amount raised by it;
• Never mind gut feeling for selecting strategy - use hard data;
• Allow people to store credit card info on central website but donate from mobile views via a button click, facilitating "drunk donation";
• Multi-step pages for donations were less off-putting than single-page large forms;
• Recruit experienced devs from major Silicon Valley social media companies (Facebook, Twitter, Google);
• Developing tools earlier in the campaign cycle than they actually did would have improved their campaign efficiency;
• Prepare and drill for the worst (major regional outages) so that when it happens you won't have problems, and you'll have a runbook telling you what to do so you just have to react, not try to problem-solve;
• Use large-scale hosting and content distribution (AWS, Akamai) to obtain well-managed distributed hardware and robust connectivity so you only have to worry about your apps;
• Program backends in Python and associated frameworks (Django, Flask) for rapid development
• Strong presence on social media posting frequent and interesting (reshareable) content;
• Target heavy online and TV ads spend in key states, age, gender, racial sectors.

I don't think it's too much to say that Obama's "Project Narwhal" spanked Romney's "Project Orca" in terms of efficiency and efficacy. Orca appears to have been a relatively traditional software and system development, using major technology vendors and consultants rather than dedicated individuals, and produced the result that anyone who has worked with large companies on a business-critical system has experienced - farce. This is ironic, as Orca typifies the Big Government approach to solving a problem, whereas Narwhal was a very libertarian project - find motivated people, give them a cause and let them work out what to do. It appears that any major companies involved in Orca quickly ran for cover after Romney's defeat; no surprise there.

Cameron and Miliband should be taking notes if they actually intend to win the next UK election. Following in the steps of Narwhal would seem to be critical to winning the social information war that modern elections are becoming.

Piers on Piers

Piers Morgan's Twitter Profile quote:

One day you're the cock of the walk, the next a feather duster.

Oh, Piers, don't sell yourself short. You'll always be a cock to us.

Blame the markets, why not?

Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCSU, is not keen on the markets:

But what are the markets? Who comprises them and why are they so powerful? I didn't vote for them and I doubt you did either – yet they apparently have the power to dictate policies to elected governments and, in the case of Italy, to even select the government.

Well, Mark, you and your members don't have to worry about markets because your pensions are paid directly by the Government, no matter what the markets do. However, for all the other employed people whose salaries pay for your pensions, their pension savings rise and fall according to how well the funds in which they are invested perform. Those funds aim to maximise revenue (we hope) by investing in companies and countries whose prospects appear rosy, and pull money out of the entities which appear to be heading for a fall.

I'm guessing that Serwotka does not intend for this article to become a Nassim Taleb discourse on performance of fund managers relative to passive trackers, and indeed it does not:

...the myth that the public sector caused the crash was allowed to develop, and the dangerous conclusion allowed to take root that hacking back the public sector would solve the crisis.

Huh? I've read the Guardian, Telegraph and Daily Mail since 2007 and can't remember anyone blaming the public sector for the 2008 crash. I thought it was fairly well-established that the crash was caused by a) American mortgage lenders lending to bad risks, b) stupid American and European banks exposing themselves to those bad risk mortgages via structured products and CDOs, and c) a flip-flop let-them-fail/OMG-bail-out-everyone approach by governments. The public sector's cost has been steadily rising over time, but has not jumped in such a way as to cause a crash.

The problem the public sector faces, Mark, as you well know but appear to have omitted in your argument, is that employment and retirement costs are steadily rising while Government income - tax, basically - is falling. Even if you fired 50% of current public sector employees, you would still have to pay extremely expensive redundancy costs, way above the statutory amounts paid by the private sector, and be on the hook for their pensions which accumulate far more quickly than private sector pensions and have no pre-funded component - each year's pension payments come directly out of Government income.

It appears that Mark is not keen on privatisation either:

Entire industries – from the railways and telecommunications, to gas, electricity and water – were taken out of collective public ownership. This transferred power over them from the ballot to the wallets of a few, the directors and shareholders who have extracted billions from them.

This may be news to you, Mark, but the public did not have any control over nationalised industries. They ran as monopolies, able to charge what they liked and subject to at best vague regulation by inept regulators. British Telecom was privatised in 1984, forced to submit to competition, and waits of weeks for telephone installation were forced down drastically. For sure, privatisation of services which retain monopolies is not likely to result in much improvement - look at the profits of the ROSCOs which lease rolling stock to the train operators in the UK - but privatising BT was one of the best things that the Government did in recent years. The constant pressure of competition resulted in rapid growth of ADSL provision around the UK; can you imagine the pre-privatisation BT ever deploying a new network at that speed?

Serwotka is afraid of privatisation squeezing out his public-sector membership; it's that simple. He is a rent seeker for public sector unions, and he does his job very well. However, that doesn't mean that the taxpayer should bow to his whims. When Mark says

When what we really need is to assert our democracy over the tyranny of the markets, in the interests of the many.

you should substitute "a few million public sector workers" for "we" and "the many", and "tens of millions of people whose pensions depend on the growth of private sector companies" for "the markets".

Social media - HP doing it right

Prolific and stylish blogger Anna Raccoon was lamenting her experiences trying to get an HP printer to talk to her Mac, an experience comparable with deciphering Linear-A:

I've spoken to 17 different technical gurus, and a few extra at Apple. Every one of them paid the minimum rate for whichever country they were in, everyone of them believing they are doing a decent days work, and every one of them utterly useless.

Let me say that this is not 1000 miles from my own experience trying to get an HP laser to talk to my Apple hardware - it's about 50% reliable on wireless connecting at best, and 100% on USB connection but only if connected before a reboot. So you should think seriously about whether wrestling with HP drivers is really what you want to do, though the printer hardware itself seems pretty good and has held up well.

But what's this? Not a day later, HP contact Anna out of the blue:

I’ve just had a charming gentleman, Keith Schneider from 'Executive Customer Relations' (sounds good anyway!), on the phone from sunny California, who assures me that they will produce a French HP Laserjet expert with perfect English who will phone me at home within 24 hours and sort the problem...

Wow. Given California is 9 hours behind France, and so Mr. Schneider only got to work about 5 hours ago if he's an early riser, that's not bad going. Keith Schneider, if you're reading this, you should give a bonus to the social media trawler who spotted this blog post, realised its importance and escalated to you. It's raised HP several notches in my eyes, and I assume many others.

Now if you could do something about the semi-trained baboons who write your drivers, I'd be even happier.

Jay Leiderman's short-sightedness

Jay Leiderman, attorney for Anonymous (how does that work?) and Lulzsec, writes in the Guardian that distributed denial of service attacks should be regarded as "speech" and thus worthy of First Amendment protection:

A reported 10,000 protesters around the world took to the internet with a protest method known as DDoS (distributed denial of service) – the functional equivalent of repeatedly hitting the refresh button on a computer. With enough people refreshing enough times, the site is flooded with traffic, slowed, or even temporarily knocked offline.

Sounds nasty. Does it cause any damage?

No damage is done to the site or its backing computer system; and when the protest is over, the site resumes business as usual.

Well, the site can't process legitimate customers. So its operators lose money. And the site monitoring will page the company's sysadmins. Who will have to spend hours managing, firefighting, blocking IPs, rebalancing and restoring the site's normal operation. Probably out of hours, at overtime. So the company has to spend money. And maybe the high traffic causes logs to fill up a disk partition and the site to lose logging or transaction information. But no computer actually explodes in a red-hot ball of fire, so no "damage" has been caused.

One person jumping up and down on a wooden bridge is just fine. A hundred people jumping up and down on a wooden bridge in concert can eventually cause timbers to crack, and the bridge to require expensive repairs. But that's OK, because it's just free speech - people are enjoying how springy the bridge is.

One person asking for a glass of water from Starbucks is normal business. A hundred people saturating the Starbucks queue and asking for a glass of water when it's their turn to be served will drive away legitimate customers, tank the store's profitability for that day and wreck their employee's chance of a performance bonus. But that's OK, because it's just free speech - people are thirsty.

One person occupying a table in a vegan restaurant and ordering a hamburger is slightly obnoxious. Twenty people doing this displaces all the restaurant's legitimate customers, aggravates the staff and kills takings for the evening. But that's OK because it's just free speech - people have the right to ask for a hamburger, as the restaurant has a right to refuse to provide one.

Now let's talk technology. Jay Leiderman believes that people hitting the refresh button on their browser at a co-ordinated time is free speech. How about running a little batch script that makes the same HTTP GET request every couple of seconds? Surely the intent is the same. How about running a batch script that listens for commands from a central server and sends HTTP GET requests to specific URLs on command? Surely the intent is the same. How about the person who runs the central server and sends the commands to all the clients - surely they are merely making use of the service that each user installing the script has provided? Congratulations Jay Leiderman, you're well on your way to legitimising botnets.

So how does Jay defend this disruption?

True, customers of the site are temporarily inconvenienced, but democracy is often messy and inconvenient. Moreover, the voice of your fellow citizen should always be worth slowing down to hear for a moment.

Really, Jay? What, specifically, are they saying? If I go to Paypal to pay for something bought on eBay (God forbid) and Paypal isn't responding, how should I know why it isn't responding? How do I know what the DDoS perps are trying to say beyond "we don't like Paypal"? It's not very specific speech, is it?

Thousands of PayPal protesters said, via their protest speech in DDoS form: "I want to make a donation to WikiLeaks; I'll take up my bandwidth to do that, then I'll leave. You'll make money, I'll feel fulfilled, everyone wins."

Wow, Jay. You can really pull information out of silence. I'm impressed. What was John Cage saying in 4'33"? With those kind of skills, you should be a literary critic, not a lawyer (although a certain parasitism characterises both professions).

Incidentally, if you operate an online service and don't have some frontend checking of traffic-per-IP spikes, you probably should. If you see an IP start to request many purchases per minute within the space of a few minutes, it's time to start putting that IP to the back of your request queue. I suspect Jay Leiderman would not appreciate you redirecting those DDoS requests to www.leidermandevine.com, his appreciation for "free speech" notwithstanding. Though I do wonder what he would think they were saying.