22
Jul
2009
Microsoft’s “Browser for the Better”
As many of you probably already know, Microsoft is doing a “Browser for the Better” campaign to promote IE8.
Basically, for every download of IE8 from their BftB site, Microsoft will donate money for 8 meals to food banks.
Note that they say “for every download,” not “for every unique download” or “for every installation.” Their mistake.
To, ah… “help” with their promotion, I would encourage people to run the following scriptlet on Linux/UNIX systems, and Windows systems with Cygwin installed:
for (( x=0; $x < 1000; x++ ))
do
curl -L http://view.atdmt.com/action/dlXP > /dev/null
sleep 60
done
This will download the browser from the site 1000 times (tweak the 1000 to your preference), dumping the downloaded data to /dev/null, and pausing 1 minute between each. I’m not trying to encourage DDoSing them here. 
Note that the file is 20.9 MB, so 1000 downloads will eat a bit over 20 GB of bandwidth in under a day. If you have a low monthly cap, this might not be for you.
