...or sending that image[1] jwz sends back upon detecting HN in the referer. I bet they'll find the app in a matter of hours, or at least reduce the traffic drastically.
Just learned that this person owns DNA Lounge (and pizza?), and is a founder (early contributor?) of Netscape and Mozilla.org. I've lived and worked in that particular area of SF for years and haven't known this.
One of my company's clients has a beautiful office right above DNA Lounge (well, across the street or just adjacent - it's been a while and I've only been there once). They told me they can hear sound checks from their rooftop patio.
about:robots is from the early Firefox releases. Pretty sure it is from Firefox 3.0 development as you can find the same robot in images when searching for Firefox Gran Paridiso Robot.
This makes me wonder why the hell referer headers are still sent by major browsers, especially to third parties. I can’t think of a single reason that benefits the user.
Originally it probably just sounded like a cool feature to see what blog linked to you. Now its been around for so long that so much has been programmed to actually use it. If you turn it off you get every anti bot script blowing up on you.
I think browsers did drop the path from it at least.
For one thing, examining referer is a common way that a server determines a request is not a hotlink. Sure you can do something more complicated with cookies or whatever, but lots of sites are just using referer and they'll break if the client doesn't send it.
Well, it'd mean that any site blocking hotlinking would also automatically block direct bookmarks/URL entry, too, which isn't really in the "interest of the user" either, I'd say.
I saw the described image but after I visited the site directly I couldn't see it any more when redirectly via hacker news. Saw it again when I opened an incognito tab.
It's a motivational-poster-type image with a white egg holder in the foreground, but instead of an egg, it's holding one exquisitely detailed hairy, caucasian ball[1]. At the top, the title is "HACKER NEWS" and the bottom text is "A DDoS OF FINANCE-OBSESSED MAN-CHILDREN AND BROGRAMMERS"
1. Is there a collective biological term for scrotum and it's contents that is not general like "genitals" is?
A permanent redirect to a non-image page (owned by Wikimedia) may achieve the same thing. Either the calling system can't support a HTML response, or it's a webview in which case you could either report an error or provide a notice. Maybe even ask for donations :)
Yes there is when you are hotlinking. Hotlinking in general is considered theft, you are using someone elses bandwidth and could even ddos the host if you are not caching the response.
This is a pretty puzzling idea to me. How could linking something be theft?
To explore this, I shall try a metaphor. Imagine you're on a big social media website (lets call it Programmer Olds) which has an oddity in that 99% of its users use adblock. You then post a link to another small (ad supported) website on your Programmer Olds page, causing a large number of people to click through and download the page using large amounts of bandwidth (for no monetary gain to the site) and possible DDOSing the site.
That's because you're responding to an entirely different issue. "Hotlinking" isn't linking to something, it's including a resource that is hosted elsewhere. It's putting <img src="https://concordDance.whatever/images/big_image.jpg"> on my website without asking you. Now if my site ends up on the front page of HN, that could cause a lot of traffic to your site, potentially overwhelming your server or increasing your hosting bill. It's not nice, and rightfully frowned upon.
> causing a large number of people to click through and download the page using large amounts of bandwidth (for no monetary gain to the site)
The difference here is that while a lot of users use adblock, there are some that don't. These users can still see the ads. Additionally even though it's a small website, it may lead to new readers that stick around or the content itself may even be sponsored.
The equivilent to hot linking a picture would be like taking the content of a blog post without really linking to the source, because there's no chance of conversions there. If you're linking to the site itself then there's a reasonable chance that users can convert.
So I suggest that it's theft just because the chances of readers being converted is nil while you're using their bandwidth.
Let's say I own a restaurant. Someone comes in and wants a panini. I don't have a panini press, but the restaurant next door does.
If I tell the customer they can go next door to get a panini, I'm not stealing anything. Maybe that restaurant is packed right now and they'ed rather not have an extra customer, but there is a reasonable expectation that they would generally want customers or at least have a means of turning away unwanted customers otherwise.
On the other hand if I break into my neighbor's restaurant, make a panini, then bring it back to my restaurant to serve and make money off of, all without permission from the neighbor, I am most definitely stealing. Even if I doubt the neighbor will mind because he let me come over and make myself a panini once, I can't unilaterally act off that assumption.
it's so easy to mitigate, though, that the fact that one doesn't sorta implies that one might want randos from the internet to use one's resources to view this image.
it's not theft if you leave it out for everyone to use.
No, but if I wander into your garden and "injure" myself, I can sue you for damages. You will be held negligent for not properly protecting yourself from preventing other people from injuring themself on your property.
Wikimedia has a User-Agent policy which is being violated here. Hence this is the property owner putting up a sign that says "risk of injury", so if you walk in and injure yourself, you only have to blame yourself for being negligent.
It's a policy how wikimedia acts when clients lack a user agent header, it's therefore effectively a rule for clients as without a proper UA header, they may be blocked indefinitely.
The problem of course is that the "victim" has a lawyer operating on a contingency, whereas you have to pay your legal costs, and generally cannot recuperate them.
In France (at least), all swimming pools are protected by a fence. If you own a pool and don't put a fence around it, you can be held responsible for a child drowning into it.
It is possible this principle applies to other countries and other things than pools.
Here in Russia, if you leave poisonous chemicals like methanol, etc, unmarked or put a bear trap in your locked house behind a locked fence with a generic warning sign, and then someone dies or gets injured by these, chances are you will go to jail. Idk if this applies to accidental traps like pools or rakes in grass. Same for taking a knife out of an attackers hand and stabbing them back. (Yes, our laws protect criminals better than citizens, not joking.)
Interesting. So if I understand this correctly, if someone breaks into your house and gets injured, and they can make a good case for some kind of negligence on your part, then they can successfully sue you?
In Poland setting marked traps on your own, fenced property is illegal and their owner is responsible for any harm they cause, because there exist legal reasons to enter another person's property - for example to fight spreading fire.
However my favourite example is the law that allows any bee keeper to enter any private property if they are pursuing fleeing bee swarm.
Leaving a bear trap goes way beyond negligence, it's literally setting a trap. Similar with unmarked dangerous chemicals, they're required to be marked for good reason.
It's also illegal to set a trap in your own home in the US as well, decided when a property owner, tired of people breaking into his property while he was away, set up a shotgun booby trap that injured a burglar.
https://youtu.be/bV9ppvY8Nx4
I wasn't sure if it is the same or similar principle in Russia or a different one that requires active care for a burglar. Unlabeled chemicals causing liability for a burglar seems extreme to me
You think this, but how much experience do you have with it? People know that homeowners have insurance. They sue to make the insurance pay out. It happened to my neighbor. So you can make all of the dumb countries comments you want, but it doesn't make it any less real.
I missed the edit window and I’m disappointed in myself for mentioning it by name. Please just don’t Google this unless you’re prepared for an upsetting image, and even then maybe just skip it. You’re probably not as prepared as you think.
Big stretched open butthole. Not sure if you need the warning but I’m commenting in case anyone would prefer not to see it despite their curiosity.
Sorry to ruin the fun y’all but there’s images I won’t even mention that I can’t unsee and make me feel seriously ill when I do see them. I don’t want anyone else to feel that way without warning.
I remember when I was about 15, before pop-up blockers were really a thing, someone sent me a link to that and it would keep opening popups with that image and you couldn't close all of them :-/
Sometimes people look back to the internet of the 90s with too rose-coloured glasses IMO.
Hey at least if you were on a 90s Mac your computer was probably unresponsive and you could skip to the inevitable force reboot. And browsers didn’t save sessions so you were in the clear as soon as you got to tabula rasa.
I’m honestly not sure you’re asking in good faith so I’m not going to add more (and if you are asking in good faith you’ve got plenty in responses to go on). Also I never knew the name of the one that’s permanently burned into my brain and I’m so glad I don’t.
Why does it need to be fixed? The mission of wikimedia is to serve educational content.
Edit: this is a bit unfair, if its a specific app they should be convinced to cache just to avoid unfair resource usage, but hotlinking in general should not be seen as a problem
Any for-profit entity hotlinking Commons is unfair. Heck, they have the right to redistribute freely the image as they see fit, instead of consuming resources that are a common good.
But this goes beyond that - it's some blind check of internet connectivity for the app, and doesn't get shown to the user. We're pretty sure of that, given that with the amount of noise that task generated, if there was an app featuring that image at least one of the ~ 90M daily "views" would've been someone reading these posts.
I'm sure there is a more enlightened fix.