No hotlinking please
just another thought arising from my earlier post
7 Comments »
vigilante justice
I wasn’t thinking of them in that way..but I see your point.
Im stuck on this “web as material/non material” thought exercise.
Spacer gifs exist to not exist, finding the 404, linking to the unlinkable. Paradox. Irony.
It’s really basic/elemental stuff…about code and servers and people and practices.
Olia tackled the ownership/property/art stuff with teleportacia a long time ago. Im just tagging along.
I am trying to fully grok data, and it’s dissemination, through quick, loose, fun experiments.
Im not trying to serve anybody justice, it is pretty funny though.
- pjbaldes — 11/3/07 @ 7:04 pm
oh there’s another good collection of these! BANDWIDTH STEALER.
years ago i made a hotlink image that i was really proud of because i custom-designed it for the person’s page, subverting their original message! they were linking this giraffe for a list of “funny facts about giraffes” and i replaced it with this one. um yeah.
Yeah been trying to grok this too… Why do you think people get so upset about hotlinking? I’ve never understood that. Is it just left over rage from the early days of the internet when bandwidth was more precious? I don’t mind hotlinking at all, I turned off the hotlink protection on my site years ago and I’ve never exceeded my bandwidth. Isn’t every visitor to a site technically “stealing” a small amount of total bandwidth just by viewing it? (ie getting slashdotted/dugg) Why does the entry point make such a difference to them – is it a money thing, or more of a recognition/attribution thing?
it’s especially complicated because some might argue that hotlinking an image is associated with plagiarism, “stealing” content AND bandwidth, but really a more active assertion that you created an image (a more offensive plagiarism) is to just put it on your own webspace so no one would ever know its original source. i guess it’s about laziness, in a way?
yeah good point… it must be more than just laziness though, because it is actually more work to make these kind of customized accusatory proxies. They must be getting off on feeling like “the Sheriff.” Like they think there should be some kind of code of ethics on the web, and the web could be improved by jpeg dunce caps and Prangers for humiliation.
the wikipedia article for this (“inline linking”) is an interesting thing to look at because it’s argued-over and badly-written and confused… which i interpret as meaning that nobody really understands it! time to recruit some investigative journalists!
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