Schlagwort-Archive: commission

Dany Odins lucky punch

back to Heliosis


Dany was a solitary Gray-hat hacker and open-source fanatic, meaning that he might violate laws, but always with a higher goal in mind, and it was hard to judge him as evil or good. He lived in a gray area, which is why he was referred to in the hacker scene as a gray eminence. The term Eminence was derived from his abilities as a hacker, because nobody knew what he looked like. His appearance had little of an eminence. He was young, not unpleasant, skinny, tall, and neglected. He did not care how he was perceived by the environment, but Dany had a job too, and that was probably the only reason he had a set of clothes to change and use his shower now and then.
Well, anyway, Dany did not make sense of the text he found on the expansion memory he’d just purchased. But he wrote down the text and eventually expanded it to the book Heliosis, from the Big Bang to the Big Bang. Earlier, Dany had tried anonymously, as „Red_Hat_Hotelmanager“, with the book „Future Hotel and Business Software“ or „Fighting the commission, protection or license money mafia in the hotel industry“, but it was only compared to Heliosis a mediocre success. But Dany was not successful either, otherwise he would not work as a clerk in a completely meaningless government job. He is something of a hacker who sits in front of his PC every spare minute or, more recently, connects to his server with his cell phone and then plays the server. He lives on his server, knows all the systems and knows all programming languages. All because, if he does not know one but needs it, he still uses it as if he had learned it. Yes, for him it was a game and his purpose in life, to watch the goings-on in the net, to continuously monitor log-files and intervene selectively if and when he deems it necessary. What for other people are TV, radio, cinema, Facebook, Twitter, entertainment with friends, leisure activities and newspapers were the log files for Dany.

If you want to read the new revised version without advertising, I recommend a purchase on Amazon:

Not only on his own computer, but on many computers worldwide, after all, he was not a white but a gray hat. To be honest, sometimes his hat turned so dark gray that it was indistinguishable from black. But that was not because of criminal energy, but because of his curiosity, his incredible abilities and the kick. Others climb an 8000’s, climb through cliffs or fly with Paragliders and wing suits, and Dany is flooding his body with adrenaline when spying on the super-secret projects of the superpowers. He knew that the slightest mistake meant his death or at least life imprisonment, and he expected no personal benefit from his actions.He could just do it and could not resist it. There was no other motivation, he had no economic, political or even religious interests, he did not want to reveal anything and he did not intervene. But he knew he could do something no one else in the world would be capable of. Yes, the whole world thought it was impossible, and yet he was capable to do it. And all this with the self-made equipment that he had in his musty little apartment. Any gamer or lamer would probably have a faster computer than him, but surely no one else had the skills and logic of Dany.
That was the reason why his hat was black for a while, because as a white-hat can hardly describe a hacker who spied on the most secretive economic and military projects of many nations and especially the superpowers, although he does no harm and especially was never discovered.

Recently, a bumbling attack on a government computing center attracts his attention. He was able to track down the attacker, hack his computer and set up a rootkit. Then he cleaned up the computer overnight, searched all the details about the person and did an extensive background check. It was a 12-year-old boy who wanted to aggrandize himself. So Dany played harmless files and programs that corresponded well with these 12-year-old boy on the computer. When the police confiscated the boy’s computer next day, they found nothing to their astonishment that pointed to a hacker attack. All logs were available but clean. Yes, they came from a boy of the same age, with only IP’s and names replaced.
The moment Dany had prepared wannabe’s compouter, the matter was forgotten to him, he just noticed an interesting activity of an access computer to a nuclear power plant …
Dany’s only contact was Jonny_White_Hat. Yes, even from him he knew only the pseudonym and they initially had contact only via a common email server. However, they did not send emails, they only wrote them and the other had access to them. Jonny_ had once built a compiler, so designed their own programming language and deposited them for Dany on the email server. Hours later, Dany filed a program in this new programming language, working with complex protocols that previously had no interfaces. This is what everyday life looked like for Jonny_ and Dany. There were only a handful of people in the world who could hold their own in the IT world and they were highly specialized, which avoided Jonny_ and Dany as much as possible. This very time-consuming attitude to life was also a reason why the two had no friends and did not want a demanding job. Dany once said to Jonny_ that he would be tempted as a programmer, systems analyst, admin or security chief. Only Jonny_ understood what he meant by that. He did not want to endanger his freedom and not have to specialize in a single area.
Since the Web 2.0, the startups have sprouted with and on the Internet, like the mushroom in the forest. Countless forums, platforms and online portals have been created. Not the best have prevailed, but several factors played a role. Not least the timing, the name for the startup and the luck. Otherwise, Facebook or Twitter would never have been known, because the programs they started with were so primitive and bumbling that almost any student who had an introduction to computer science could program it. Even so, many forums and social media sites had to close down on how users went over to Facebook or Twitter. Of course, in the beginning there had been some help with fake accounts, and so on. Nevertheless, it had become a new trend to lure users into sites, giving them the opportunity to communicate and share their data with the public. With these free employees you could and can easily earn money. Sure, many have tried it and only on Facebook and Twitter it worked. Both made good use of the first onslaught and then you have to admit that they were very good business people. The same goes for Google and Amazon. But everyone just can not be so lucky and in addition so much sense to start the right project at the right time.
Dany was lucky, because in the hotel and tourism industry at that time there was the wildest usury with commissions. For a reservation in a hotel could be 2 to 5 percent appropriate and for a long time 8 percent were common. But when a company gains a monopoly, it can take advantage of that power and demand outrageous commissions, which are as high as 20-30%. And to do that almost without a return. Almost all hoteliers were dependent on an online portal and many had to close down because the commissions were simply priceless. So, why this job and the risk? You could put your money on the bank and wait until it was used up by inflation, that was just as good, but no effort. It was at this time that Dany wrote his book under a pseudonym that explained simply how to get out of the dilemma with a good, efficient, eco-friendly, paperless concept, open source software, and especially ERPS (Enterprise Resource Planning Software) could save. Dany created this concept using Ubuntu or Fedora, Odoo, Postfix & Dovecot, MySQL or PostgreSQL, AmaViS, Clam Antivirus, SpamAssassin, Roundcube, LibreOffice, Backup Manager, Firefox, Scripts, Evolution and OpenXchange running on its own server in-house or remot in a data center could be implemented. The workstations also used open source software. With this software, smaller companies that were about to give up had another chance.
When Jonny_ learned that Dany was writing this book, he got himself an old, dusty copy of the book „Future Hotel and Business Software“ and read, for example:
„I find it unbelievable how companies that have come to a kind of monopoly position exploit this power. In some cases even the state has to regulate, because these bloodsuckers ruin their own customers. As a mediation commission or as a commission for the use of mediocre technology, I think 2 to 3 percent appropriate, but never 20 to 30 percent of sales. On top of that, these bloodsuckers already insist on best price guarantee and forbid a hotelier that he offers his service directly through the own homepage cheaper.
This is not enough, smoking ban and no smoking, labeling of goods, new cash registers duty and then also licenses and horrendous costs for the hotel management software, accounting and payroll.
The problem with the commission madness would of course be very easy to solve, because if all hoteliers from today no more commissions on special search engines, price comparators and online portals would pay, there would be no more tomorrow and the number of bookings would remain the same. Unfortunately, one can not expect such a unity from the hoteliers, which is why I called for those who want to free themselves from dependence by using Hotel-ERP & PMS.
Hotel ERP & PMS puts an end to all this and by making adjustments in areas already indicated, you can immediately make up for any loss of sales if you no longer receive bookings from the commission mafia and return to a long-term profit that a well-run company can generate, if it does not have to pay „protection and extortion money“.
Instead, invest some of the commissions you’ve paid up to now in „Google AdWords“ and pass some of that directly to your customers. That’s how they achieve independence.
Hotel ERP & PMS is a challenge and an attempt to give their share to the people (programmers) who have done a great job and continue to do a great job. Anyone who is satisfied with Hotel ERP & PMS should provide the creators of the open source software they use with a donation in their sole discretion, if the financial situation permits. …“

If you want to read the new revised version without advertising, I recommend a purchase on Amazon:

Yes, it really was a challenge to fight, a concept and an attempt to enable smaller businesses to survive. Dany reportedly had such great success that he was able to provide strong support to the open source community and in turn responded by adapting their software to his proposed concept. After a short time, all online portals that only lived on a commission and gave up all price comparisons and special search engines had to file for bankruptcy. But the employees of these companies came to the now healthy tourism industry and now did a value-adding job.
The concept stipulated that the customer or guest entered their data when making a booking, and that data was then used until the company’s annual balance sheet. There was no receptionist and no bookkeeping that had to enter redundant data even once again.
The software was suitable for all areas, not just sales, purchasing, warehousing, accounting, payroll, and Web site, but there were thousands of additional free modules from Odoo, the ERP software. The savings from the efficient system should be passed on directly to the customer and the users of System Future Hotel Software agreed that they offered the best price on their own homepage. Google seized the opportunity and came up with a hotel feature on Google Maps that showed available rooms in the chosen environment and price. It was a free service from Google, because they earned by using the feature by switching, as usual ads.
Due to the advantages, the mentioned open source software became the standard software in companies and in private use, because after the Future Hotel Software the Future Business Software followed for all industries. The open source community came together, met, discussed, and they built the software directly into the respective Linux distributions, so it became very simple to install and configure them. The system was also extended to a version for large companies, where the server was running in a cloud.
The „Red_Hat_Hotelmanager“, that is Dany, was celebrated as a kind of Robin Hood, especially in the hotel industry, and in the open source community he also had a kind of heroic status. But as soon as the project was a success, Dany Odin was no longer interested. He wanted to return to his old passion, the hacking, the artificial intelligence and the androids, but it turned out differently than he imagined.

(65)