My Thumbnail Topic Image Link Collection
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@scottalanmiller said:
@JaredBusch said:
Just because you are only providing the link and not actually using the bandwidth does not take you out of the loop. Of course the actual bandwidth is getting used by all the people that view ML and not by ML itself. But ML is the legal entity that embedded the link to enable the theft of bandwidth.
Using the term "embed" is misleading. It is a reference. Yes the browser will embed it into the final, displayed product, but the link itself is just a reference - the same as any link like the references.
If you link to an image in text, you could make the same claims. But would you?
Not, it is not the same. There is no bandwidth being used on the other site by just providing a link.
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@JaredBusch said:
A link to my site is much different because it takes the user entirely to my site. It makes it known that it is a different site ...
That's by convention only. Both take you to the full referenced resource. The idea of going to a "whole site" doesn't actually exist. And even a reference link only goes to a page, to a text document. It's still a singular resource.
From a technical perspective, there is no difference. it's only a human perception thing that makes one seem different from the other.
In both cases you load the "entire resource". In both cases it is "just a file." In both cases it is "publicly serviced willing by the provider." In both cases it is exposed to the end user if they choose to look and hidden if they don't.
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@JaredBusch said:
Not, it is not the same. There is no bandwidth being used on the other site by just providing a link.
I explained earlier how that isn't true. By convention, today most people do not automatically download links, but some do and always have. By convention, most people automatically download images but some do not and always have not.
Both pull automatically at the discretion of the end user, not determined by the site itself.
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You are using convention of client default settings, that are only recent conventions for use, to determine what is theft and what is not. That's not a good way to determine theft. You can't apply it like that.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@JaredBusch said:
Not, it is not the same. There is no bandwidth being used on the other site by just providing a link.
I explained earlier how that isn't true. By convention, today most people do not automatically download links, but some do and always have. By convention, most people automatically download images but some do not and always have not.
Both pull automatically at the discretion of the end user, not determined by the site itself.
What an absolute bunch of shit.
How in the hell can you rationalize that most people do not download links when the entire point of this is the fact that you are providing a service to let people see images without paying to host the images yourself.
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@JaredBusch said:
What an absolute bunch of shit.
How in the hell can you rationalize that most people do not download links when the entire point of this is the fact that you are providing a service to let people see images without paying to host the images yourself.
I'm unclear how it is confusing. Yes, clearly the idea is not to host the images locally. And the idea is NOT to not pay, it is not to host ourselves. That's why we have an account for the hosting. And we pay for Cloud Files as well. We just don't want the files on the same server.
But what I don't understand is how you can claim this then rationalize that not wanting to host the sites and information that you linked in the same manner are different? To you it is "black and white theft" when I put a link on ML and "black and white just fine" when you do it in the same place. We both put public references, in a text document, on the same thread, on the same site. Both can be pulled automatically, neither must be. Yet to you it is clear one is right and one is wrong. I'm just saying that whatever they are, they appear to be the same.
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I'm a bit lost.
If I have a link to msn.com <- that is now blue meaning if you click it, you will go there. Scott are you saying that there are browsers that when that blue link is there, it actually downloads the entire page at msn.com? That would be weird - why would any browser ever do that? That link is just that, a link to a place to go, there is very little if anything saved by the browser automatically saving that link.
Now on to images. I tend to fall on the side with JB on having non hosting sites display images that are hosted by another site (unless there is an agreement in place). Why? Because, as JB said, if a super popular site puts a reference tag to an image that is hosted on my website, and the visitors web browsers who visit that popular site are all now downloading that image from my site, causing me to pay huge ISP bills, that seems inherently wrong. As he mentioned, the image is hosted on my site for my viewers to utilize, not the general public, and my economic system is setup under that guise.
While lawfully there may be no breaking of the law, there should definitely be technological ways to stop this siphoning of bandwidth for non visitors to your site.
This reminds me of text messaging up until around 6 years ago. You could send text messages to anyone you wanted.. and doing so was unpreventable by the receiving party - but what made this egregious was that the phone company then charged you for an incoming text message that you didn't ask for, nor did you have any recourse to prevent.
This seems unlawful by nature to me, regardless of it's actual lawfulness status.
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Why hasn't @Danielle-Ralston commented on this issue?
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@Dashrender said:
If I have a link to msn.com <- that is now blue meaning if you click it, you will go there. Scott are you saying that there are browsers that when that blue link is there, it actually downloads the entire page at msn.com?
I'm not aware of browsers that do that but caching proxies at the client sites absolutely do. Microsoft, for example, provided that as a major feature of their Proxy Server product. Squid does that. Lots of systems do. It's less common now, but for the first decade of the graphical web it was very common, back when automatically loading inline images was not as common.
Because sites use dynamic content quite often today (although there is a move away from that) it became less useful. But for a very long time it was incredibly common and was a great means of even getting home networks to be fast. It's how people got LAN-like performance for web browsing back when they had only dial-up WAN options.
It made tons of sense because it would trickle bandwidth in while people were idle or asleep and provide "instant" browsing speed once they needed it. Even pages that they had already visited would be refreshed once a day or whatever (all depending on settings, of course.)
Even if this wasn't a standard thing that people did and can still do, doesn't change that the links are all just links.
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@Dashrender said:
...Because, as JB said, if a super popular site puts a reference tag to an image that is hosted on my website, and the visitors web browsers who visit that popular site are all now downloading that image from my site, causing me to pay huge ISP bills, that seems inherently wrong.
This used to be called being Slashdotted and referred to you being linked to, not to an image or resource being linked directly. Do you feel then, as it fits your description, that all linking is inherently wrong? If not, why not since you describe all linking as wrong.
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@Dashrender said:
As he mentioned, the image is hosted on my site for my viewers to utilize, not the general public, and my economic system is setup under that guise.
That's an assumption, nothing makes it true. I'll agree that that may be a common intent, but it is absolutely not fully true. Look at YouTube, for example, they totally intend direct links to their content, not their site. Look at Cloud Files or S3. Look at Technet with their PDFs.
Remember, the full pages and the resources on them are shared and made public equally. What makes one the intention and the other not? That is a feeling, a convention, that you put on them, not one that they put on themselves or that is inherent to the web. When the web was young and hotlinking began, there were no such conventions. Many sites did and still do, host resources without web pages that use them, for example.
If a site does not want resources hotlinked they are free to limit how those resources are called, of course.
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@Dashrender said:
While lawfully there may be no breaking of the law, there should definitely be technological ways to stop this siphoning of bandwidth for non visitors to your site.
There are. If people did not want their resources shared there are certainly ways that they can do that.
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@Dashrender said:
This reminds me of text messaging up until around 6 years ago. You could send text messages to anyone you wanted.. and doing so was unpreventable by the receiving party - but what made this egregious was that the phone company then charged you for an incoming text message that you didn't ask for, nor did you have any recourse to prevent.
That's completely different. Texting is a monopoly service, something that was unable to be turned off by anyone wanting cell phone service (I know, I tried) and was used as a forced means of billing customers.
Publicly hosting resources intended for sharing is fully optional and is not required for hosting other resources, and can be blocked as desired. There is no relationship between the two. Nothing is shared, not the monopoly component, not the forced billing, not the non-optional. Nothing that makes texting wrong is shared with web hosting.
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@Dashrender said:
This seems unlawful by nature to me, regardless of it's actual lawfulness status.
If you believe so, then I assume that since all components of your reasoning match all forms of linking that you agree with my statement that while you may find hotlinking wrong, you must also find all linking wrong by logical extension. One cannot be separated from the other, they are the exact same thing technically - a reference in a text file optionally followed by the end user.
Only convention over time has changed the text file portion from being the part automatically followed most of the time to the image one. And will that change in the future? Will your perception change based on convention again? If perception of right and wrong change every ten years based on how you perceive common usage, does that make that perception inherently flawed?
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Just for reference, here is how any site running Apache (which is a lot) can trivially block hotlinking. This is all that it takes for a webmaster to inform us that they do not want resources of these types to be called without being called from their own site:
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain2.com [NC] RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ http://hpmouse.googlepages.com/hotlink.gif [NC,R,L]That goes in .htaccess, for those not familiar. So you can do this on your own server or on a host like A Small Orange, for example. Of course, the last line sends them to Google. It's both hysterical and hypocritical that the person who made the example decided that instead of blocking hotlinking, they would hotlink Google themselves. Clearly whoever wrote it agrees that there is nothing wrong with hotlinking, because it is always at the discretion of the server being hotlinked to.
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So stealing is acceptable if I don't stop you from doing it?
So if I leave my bike on the sidewalk, while I go into buy a drink, it's OK for you to steal it, because I didn't lock it?
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@anonymous said:
So stealing is acceptable if I don't stop you from doing it?
It's a reference to something you offer freely. If you offer something freely when someone requests it, do you normally refer to someone who told that person that you were doing so as stealing? You define stealing in a very odd way.
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@anonymous said:
So if I leave my bike on the sidewalk, while I go into buy a drink, it's OK for you to steal it, because I didn't lock it?
That's stealing, nothing like the situation at hand. Hotlinking requires going to the person offering the service, requesting the file and getting it - and the hotlinking itself is just a reference to the person being willing to give it out.
If you hand out your bike to anyone who asks, do you feel you are being stolen from?
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No one is discussing if stealing is okay. It is not. We are discussing differing definitions of stealing. To you, telling someone that someone else hands things out willingly is stealing, but actually asking for those resources is not.
To me, stealing cannot involve telling someone about a freely available, public resource.
By your definition, all use of the Internet is stealing as you are not paying for any website that you access and it is offered in a free way and you get there by some reference. So everything has to be stealing.
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Remember what a web server is, it is a server that hands out files that are requested. In order to do so, whoever runs the server has to have made the decision that they want to hand out those files. That is its purpose.
When someone requests the file from the web server, the server has the option to accept or decline the request.
There are two ways to stop hotlinking here - to not publish things that people do not wish published or to decide to only publish in certain ways. Someone has to make the server allow the files to be given out before hotlinking is an option, it cannot happen otherwise.
