Python obfuscation

[Anton Vredegoor]

Alex Martelli wrote:

> Modern equivalent of serialization (publishing one chapter at a time on
> the web, the next chapter to come only if the author receives enough
> payment for the previous one) have been attempted, but without much
> success so far; however, the holy grail of "micropayments" might yet
> afford a rebirth for such a model -- if paying for a chapter was
> extremely convenient and cheap, enough people might choose to do so
> rather than risk the next chapter never appearing.  Remember that, by
> totally disintermediating publishers and bookstores, a novelist may
> require maybe 1/10th of what the book would need to gross in stores, in
> order to end up with the same amount of cash in his or her pockets.
>
> One could go on for a long time, but the key point is that there may or
> may not exist viable monetization models for all sorts of endeavours,
> including the writing of novels, depending on a lot of other issues of
> social as well as legal structures.  Let's not be blinded by one model
> that has worked sort of decently for a small time in certain sets of
> conditions, into believing that model is the only workable one today or
> tomorrow, with conditions that may be in fact very different.

Maybe this micropayment thing is already working and active. What is
the cost of a mouseclick and what is the monetarial value of the fact
that someone is clicking on a link? Someone bought virtual property for
real money and sold it later with a lot of profit. There are pages
where one can buy pixels. Maybe me replying to you will provoke some
other chain of events with payoffs for you or me (I hope positive :-)

The idea of using a webservice to hide essential secret parts of your
application can only work well if one makes some random alterations to
the results of the queries. Like GPS signals that are deliberately made
less exact. Obfuscated Python code could for example return variable
precision numbers with a slight random alteration. I think such things
would make it harder to reverse engineer the code behind the server.

But the more one messes with the ideal output the more often the user
will rather click another link. (or launch another satellite)

Anton.

what's the current exchange rate for clicks and dollars?