Bandwidth leeching - Classic or Dud

http://goatse.cx/

I have my own webspace so I don't do it but I don't think people should mind really.

haha ripping off free servers, get lower than that

I refute claims that it encourages the "web to be like a web". When you embed an image from someone else's server, you do not provide any link to that server at all - the browser just fetches it, and it could be hosted anywhere for all the average user is aware. Hypertext links make the www a "web", not images.

In short: don't do it!

I'm considering seting up some sort of image hosting service on this server for ilx users, but I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not.

but i dont mind leeching off, say, amazon, but i guess its not so fair off small people

thing is, if there is an interesting pic, i look at the source code, see where its at, and go and look at the site

http://www.sonicstate.com/synth/images/quasar.jpg

(BTW i am listening to someone inseminate a camel on Radio 4)

percentage of time i look at linked image im interested in and then at site itself: 100%

ILE wouldn't be the same without image linking.

(I haven't worked out how to FTP things to my web space yet)

I can see that it is bad in some way, but if yahoo et al. can block it, why can't other people?

not that i own my own webspace, but i would say probably because it's a pain in the arse, and they really shouldn't have to. that's like saying "well why should i stop stealing tvs out of peoples houses, if they really wanted me to stop, they should put locks on their windows".

Having said that, I think that while I agree bandwidth leeching is bad and I have no probs with sites preventing remote linking, surely thats a drop in the ocean compared with broadband fucking warez leechers who sit online all day downloading games, movies and music they refuse to pay for, and then whine when their DSL gets capped at 3 gig . THREE GIG!!! I'd be lucky if I managed to pull down 200mb a month on a dialup, I doubt I'd do more on broadband.

Um... I know thats not really the topic here, I just saw this soapbox...

Fuck them. What did they ever do?

As for you Jim: heh, I guess I wasn't thinking ;) Mmmm, magic credit cards you never have to pay back....

the problems surrounding deep linking to html files are complicated, but I think it's commonsense that non-commercial, non-systematic deep linking (i.e. not like in say the ticketmaster vs. microsoft or tickets.com cases) is acceptable. I don't think this is contravened by current legal precedent concerning copyright law, but would appreciate hearing otherwise if so.

that is, if it's ok for you to put a link to a web page, say, four levels down from the front page of someone's site on some other page, it should be ok to put a link to an image of the same size.

inline images complicate this somewhat because unless inline image loading is turned off, they load automatically, and thus stand to be served more often than an equivalent html file via a link (though if the link is popular enough the bandwidth will be equivalent again).

but I'm not sure how this makes inline image leeching necessarily bad. a host has no control over how popular its site gets, which means that it can receive unexpected amounts of traffic. so I don't see how this could be an issue of permission, or lack of control.

there are copyright issues but in the kinds of cases we seem to be talking about with respect to ilx, I'm not sure they have much weight. (recent court cases have involved people successfully suing others who copy their images in order to re-serve them for archival purposes, like google does. the basis for this has something to do, I think, with the copyright holder losing control over how the images are presented - which has something to do with say images appearing outside of their original contexts, not distrubution of the images? but I'd appreciate guidance.)

this post is more speculative than my last one.

I think there's a difference between this kind of image and the sort of photos and pictures linked on ilx, but I'm having trouble expressing the difference at the moment.

Has anyone come to ILX because they found us in their server log (other than b*ngb*s, from what I've been told)?

[a web can have leaves on it! in the computer science sense.]

glenn mcdonald did.

We also deleted some images posted from a right wing website once because of server log referral fears.

The difference between html linking and picture linking (on here anyway) is that html linking gives a much bigger chance of the link-follower staying, looking round a site, bookmarking etc.

If you link to a picture of 120K and if 100 people look at that thread, it will show on the their server as 12MEGs of bandwidth being used. If there is a lot of people who look at the thread then who knows, over a month their band usage could climb into the 50-75 gig or more and this could bust the limit permitted by their provider so they'll have to pay for the extra usage. An image hosting service on this server for ilx users would be sweet. I wouldn't abuse it of course but using it rather than linking from my little personal site would put my mind at ease.

50 gigs would be on the order of half a million requests in a month, or about 16000 requests per day. it seems unlikely to me that ilx has that kind of readership, but the administrators should tell us if a problem of that sort is a real possibility.

If a thread has a 120k image on it and 100 people view the thread, that's 12Mb of bandwidth. Many of those people will reload that thread later as it's updated, and if their browser has for some reason not cached the image, that's more bandwidth.

If there's a link, though, many of those 100 people won't bother clicking on it. In fact, I'd guess that well under 50 people would do. And they're only likely to click it once.

Please note this is a rounding.
120Kb*100 = 12, 000 kb = 11.71825 Mb which over a month by Sebastien's random figure is about 20 Gb less or more imporantly 21,474,836,480 bytes less if I counted everything up right.

It was decided that unlike the rest of a metric system, 1 Mb would equal 2^10 kb and 1 Gb would also be 1024 of a Mb so it takes 1048576 Kb to make a Gigabyte of memory.
Binary is a bitch some days.

They have now!