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@Dashrender said:
Someone posts a picture on a website, and people get the direct link to the object on that site, then post that link on another site in such a way that the end user can view the image without viewing the original source page where the image was discovered.
Well but that is not how it works. You are, again, injecting context. People host images. Some people who host images (most, I grant you) also host an HTML page that references those images. The hosting of the image is a fully hosted resource from that server, a peer resource with the HTML page. They are equals, peers. The context of one is a text file, the other is an image. But both are just files served from a file server.
Either resource can be restricted in how it is downloaded if desired or made available publicly. They are equal. The idea that there is a set context does not exist with the files. that is something that is added and is purely opinion and, I know for a fact, does not always apply.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Text messaging is the only example I can come up with. In the beginning, Texting wasn't free, the end device owners paid for both incoming and outgoing messages (generally). So someone could send me 100 text messages and suddenly my phone bill was $25 higher (plus taxes) because of someone else's behavior, a behavior I couldn't stop.
I showed earlier how this was not a possibly comparison. Text numbers and reception capability is forced on end users, it is non-optional if you want a cell phone (due to monopolies.)
Publishing a web site is fully at the discretion of the publisher and each time it is served out it has to be done so at the discretion of the server. There is always the option to not do it. So exactly not like the text message scenario.
Also, the standard use case of the web, the one for which it was designed, is to share data via references from other data. Sure you could use the web with a different intention, but the intention of its creation was for a specific usage that involved sites referencing resources on each other.
Even before the web we used Gopher for somewhat similar purposes. typically to large text documents back when a text document was thousands of times more expensive to download than an image is today.
Publishing a web site you expect people to avoid is like putting up a billboard and being upset that people don't shield their eye as you drive by,
But viewers looking at the billboard doesn't cost the advertiser more or less money - it has no effect on them.
I'll agree with the original intent of the web. Unfortunately, times they have'a changed.
Do you have the ability to setup a web server that can block who can and can't download an image? easily? for example - and option would be... someone could be forced to give a link to a website with an image posted there, instead of directly to the image. Then if you want to see the picture, you have to visit the whole website, not just choose to download one object from that site.
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@Dashrender said:
But viewers looking at the billboard doesn't cost the advertiser more or less money - it has no effect on them.
First, that's not actually relevant. But I agree that that is true.
Same with most website views. ML doesn't pay each time you load the site, not in any manner. The capacity rate is flat. Sure, if you pulled billions of them we would slow down or need to increase capacity, there is a limit, but just pulling the site does not increase the cost. Sure, some places run that way, they also pay less in general. It's a trade off. But you are putting assumptions on someone else's decision to publish material. None of that is relevant.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Someone posts a picture on a website, and people get the direct link to the object on that site, then post that link on another site in such a way that the end user can view the image without viewing the original source page where the image was discovered.
Well but that is not how it works. You are, again, injecting context. People host images. Some people who host images (most, I grant you) also host an HTML page that references those images. The hosting of the image is a fully hosted resource from that server, a peer resource with the HTML page. They are equals, peers. The context of one is a text file, the other is an image. But both are just files served from a file server.
Either resource can be restricted in how it is downloaded if desired or made available publicly. They are equal. The idea that there is a set context does not exist with the files. that is something that is added and is purely opinion and, I know for a fact, does not always apply.
And of course you're right, and HTML file or image file does not matter (though most HTML is generated on the fly today, so....). I think it should apply equally.
CDNs are different - if you are an image (file) hosting facility, then it's your job to host files for reference from other sights.
But if can put a file on my website that I can prevent being presented as a part of someone else's website, I can see real reasons why I would want to do that.
Heck if I'm an artist, I might not want my artwork 'borrowed' for other websites to broadcast my work. You want to see my work, go to my page, download it as part of my provided solution.
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@Dashrender said:
I'll agree with the original intent of the web. Unfortunately, times they have'a changed.
Some people choosing to publish files, but not intending to publish them, on a public publishing platform that they don't want to use as intended, expected, etc. do not constitute a mistake on someone else's part.
No different than you can't get upset if you put data on a billboard that you didn't want everyone to get to read. Oh, that's now how you thought billboards work? Guess whose fault that is - hint, not the person who reads it and uses the billboard platform as intended.
You can't apply ethics in a "well, some people decided that wasn't how they thought things should be used at this particular time" sort of way. That's not how it works.
What if a site was set up twenty years ago and just left running... would it be ethical to link to it, not ethical, then ethical again as public confusion changes over time?
What about if another twenty year old site referenced it and both were left running. What if the owners both died?
Would the one referencing the first one be either for ten years, then later would the dead man who set it up become unethical post mortem simply because "the times changed"? I don't believe so.
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@Dashrender said:
Do you have the ability to setup a web server that can block who can and can't download an image? easily? for example - and option would be... someone could be forced to give a link to a website with an image posted there, instead of directly to the image. Then if you want to see the picture, you have to visit the whole website, not just choose to download one object from that site.
Yes, and to make sure it was visibly simple I posted the code on how to do it in the thread a few pages back so that people could see how trivial it was.
Now if people are doing crazy stuff to work around obvious attempts to block linking... I would totally agree with you. Even light security is security. I'm only talking about fully public resources that are presented as peers with any other resource on the server.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
But viewers looking at the billboard doesn't cost the advertiser more or less money - it has no effect on them.
First, that's not actually relevant. But I agree that that is true.
Same with most website views. ML doesn't pay each time you load the site, not in any manner. The capacity rate is flat. Sure, if you pulled billions of them we would slow down or need to increase capacity, there is a limit, but just pulling the site does not increase the cost. Sure, some places run that way, they also pay less in general. It's a trade off. But you are putting assumptions on someone else's decision to publish material. None of that is relevant.
So you're saying it's nearly impossible for someone today who has a $100 year hosting bill, that it's nearly impossible for them to get a $1500 bill next month because someone linked to a file on my site that goes viral?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Do you have the ability to setup a web server that can block who can and can't download an image? easily? for example - and option would be... someone could be forced to give a link to a website with an image posted there, instead of directly to the image. Then if you want to see the picture, you have to visit the whole website, not just choose to download one object from that site.
Yes, and to make sure it was visibly simple I posted the code on how to do it in the thread a few pages back so that people could see how trivial it was.
You did? I missed it, I'll have to dig back... is it in this thread?
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@Dashrender said:
Heck if I'm an artist, I might not want my artwork 'borrowed' for other websites to broadcast my work. You want to see my work, go to my page, download it as part of my provided solution.
I'd normally argue that that artist was misguided if they did not want people to learn about their work, but that is another conversation entirely.
But any artist that wanted to do that can and does. A good example is Flickr, you cannot link to my photos on Flickr, they make sure that that does not work. Even though my own content there is licensed so that you can copy it and host it yourself if you need to. You CAN download it manually and do that, but Flickr prevents hot linking.
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@Dashrender said:
So you're saying it's nearly impossible for someone today who has a $100 year hosting bill, that it's nearly impossible for them to get a $1500 bill next month because someone linked to a file on my site that goes viral?
Of course that is possible. All it takes is going for the wrong type of connection. Anyone can get any bad ISP agreement and then host on it. But they would get screw even more if people were going to the "full page" rather than just an image in that case too, as even more content would be pulled. So the $1500 bill might be $1800!
But if you have a concern around that you don't use metered connections or have a throttle or monitor logs or whatever. There are options. Web hosting is an option pass time, tracking your bandwidth or using connections that can't explode is just part of doing that.
Same with telephony. Do you pay for incoming calls? You might want to restrict the rate at which you can receive them.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Do you have the ability to setup a web server that can block who can and can't download an image? easily? for example - and option would be... someone could be forced to give a link to a website with an image posted there, instead of directly to the image. Then if you want to see the picture, you have to visit the whole website, not just choose to download one object from that site.
Yes, and to make sure it was visibly simple I posted the code on how to do it in the thread a few pages back so that people could see how trivial it was.
You did? I missed it, I'll have to dig back... is it in this thread?
I thought so but it is possible that it is in the other, related thread.
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@Dashrender said:
So you're saying it's nearly impossible for someone today who has a $100 year hosting bill, that it's nearly impossible for them to get a $1500 bill next month because someone linked to a file on my site that goes viral?
Just remember that this applies to all files, not just images.
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One example of direct media hosting that I have done, more than once, is of audio files. Far larger than an image. These were full MP3 and, if you can remember these, Ogg Vorbis files. Yes, there was a website somewhere that referenced them so that you could learn about them, but the purpose, the context of them, was not to be part of a page but to be directly linked to and downloaded or streamed. The web page was only to make them discoverable as you would never know about them otherwise. There was a directory that if you knew it was there would list them, but that was it.
The secret to doing this safely is either.. not have songs that are that popular or to have an unmetered connection so that you can't be surprised by the cost. I had both of these failsafes.
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Dear leaders of the People's Democratic Republic of MangoLassi,
Directly hotlinking to images is generally considered poor internet manners in the circles I've run in, but that doesn't seem to be universal so I won't argue that.
More pragmatically, hotlinking allows someone else to effectively embed arbitrary content on your site should they so desire. This introduces the potential for performance and security issues you cannot directly control should the image host get vindictive...
Example: if someone notices dog.jpg on their site is getting way more traffic than makes sense, they can replace it with dog1.jpg on their site's links and then do whatever they want with the original image. This can range from introducing performance issues (dog.jpg is now a 10mb photo!) to, if they are truly nasty, embedding malware within the image to be served wherever it's linked.
The chances of this actually happening are pretty low, of course, but it's possible and I don't know if anything could be done on the website to check for changes in what's getting served from hotlinks.
I'm hoping the NodeBB devs use the Imgur API to automatically upload images linked to and serve that instead. That would eliminate the bandwidth concerns as well as the potential revenge issues.
I'd appreciate some sort of option to turn topic icons off in the meantime, but I also understand it would probably be a lot of work to add that in if NodeBB doesn't already provide it!
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So you're saying it's nearly impossible for someone today who has a $100 year hosting bill, that it's nearly impossible for them to get a $1500 bill next month because someone linked to a file on my site that goes viral?
Just remember that this applies to all files, not just images.
That is why I used the word file, not image
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So you're saying it's nearly impossible for someone today who has a $100 year hosting bill, that it's nearly impossible for them to get a $1500 bill next month because someone linked to a file on my site that goes viral?
Just remember that this applies to all files, not just images.
That is why I used the word file, not image
Right
But then it means all linking would be bad. Which is the entire point of the web. Without linking, we'd just use FTP servers. -
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So you're saying it's nearly impossible for someone today who has a $100 year hosting bill, that it's nearly impossible for them to get a $1500 bill next month because someone linked to a file on my site that goes viral?
Of course that is possible. All it takes is going for the wrong type of connection. Anyone can get any bad ISP agreement and then host on it. But they would get screw even more if people were going to the "full page" rather than just an image in that case too, as even more content would be pulled. So the $1500 bill might be $1800!
But if you have a concern around that you don't use metered connections or have a throttle or monitor logs or whatever. There are options. Web hosting is an option pass time, tracking your bandwidth or using connections that can't explode is just part of doing that.
Same with telephony. Do you pay for incoming calls? You might want to restrict the rate at which you can receive them.
And this is why many services like this have gone to unlimited solutions, rate limited perhaps, but otherwise unlimited.
I'll admit I haven't looked into that type of option for web hosting, nor do I ever see it advertised on SMB type web hosts - instead I see it advertised that you get something like 100 GB of bandwidth a month, etc.
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@WingCreative said:
I'm hoping the NodeBB devs use the Imgur API to automatically upload images linked to and serve that instead. That would eliminate the bandwidth concerns as well as the potential revenge issues.
I'm not sure that's really an option. You could find yourself in copyright violation once you make a copy of someone else's image without their permission and serve it up to the web.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So you're saying it's nearly impossible for someone today who has a $100 year hosting bill, that it's nearly impossible for them to get a $1500 bill next month because someone linked to a file on my site that goes viral?
Of course that is possible. All it takes is going for the wrong type of connection. Anyone can get any bad ISP agreement and then host on it. But they would get screw even more if people were going to the "full page" rather than just an image in that case too, as even more content would be pulled. So the $1500 bill might be $1800!
But if you have a concern around that you don't use metered connections or have a throttle or monitor logs or whatever. There are options. Web hosting is an option pass time, tracking your bandwidth or using connections that can't explode is just part of doing that.
Same with telephony. Do you pay for incoming calls? You might want to restrict the rate at which you can receive them.
And this is why many services like this have gone to unlimited solutions, rate limited perhaps, but otherwise unlimited.
I'll admit I haven't looked into that type of option for web hosting, nor do I ever see it advertised on SMB type web hosts - instead I see it advertised that you get something like 100 GB of bandwidth a month, etc.
Things like A Small Orange meter you but then cut you off. If you need more, you buy it. They will email you so that you have a warning. So no surprises, at least no big ones.
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If you do big hosting you can easily get things like 100Mb/s from a datacenter or buy it by the TB like many of us do. It's cheap. To get to $1500 you would have to have quite the pipe. That is like a 100Mb/s saturated from a top datacenter for a full year
