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"Defacing" Sites Without Intruding?
clambert asks: "In putting the finishing touches on a recently launched site, I decided to place one of the many 'Powered By PHP' logos on the bottom of the page. Being tired, I carelessly put in a direct link to the file on the server offering the image. The next evening, I was informed that there was a large, offensive picture on the bottom of every page. Apparently, the webmaster of the remote server thought it would be funny to replace the 900 byte PHP logo with a 121KB 'photo' (I'll spare everyone from the details). This was done without contacting any of our admins first, and was clearly a move to deface our site's presentation. Would bandwidth have been their concern, they wouldn't of increased the size of the image being requested. Although we're not considering it, my question is who would have the upper hand if this were a high profile case brought to court. Intentionally defacing a site's appearance, but without breaking into the any of the site's servers." Publishing content on the web largely boils down to a matter of trust. If you are going to link from your homepage to an image, or another web page, you are trusting the author of the web page (and the administrator of that web server, assuming they aren't one and the same) to keep that content intact. So what should happen when that trust is broken, if anything?
Come on; didn't you read the post? He was tired. I can sympathize with him. Once, I went to the store to buy several DVD players. It had been a long day, though, so I accidentally went to the loading dock instead of inside the store, and accidentally walked away with the DVD players without paying for them.
Looking at http://www.php.net/download-logos.php, you can see the text, highlighted in red so that even a moron can't miss it: Do not just include the graphic from our servers on your page! Copy the image to your site.
Now explain to me again why you feel so hard done by? If it had been my server that was getting spammed by your link, I would have replaced it with the goatse image.
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- You create an image tag pointing to a resource on someone else's server.
- The administrator of the other server chooses to save another file with the same name on his server.
- You feel that you've been violated?
I know this is going to come off harsh, but you're a moron! When you point to another resource on the net, you're always putting yourself at risk of what may change on that site. When you compound that error by allowing that resource to appear that it's actually part of your site, it's your own damn fault when you end up with egg on your face.Moral of the story? Download the image and put it on your own server - don't expect your laziness to be an excuse.
Jeesh.
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
Well, the other day the jerk hooks my extension cord up to some big, mean, nasty transformer and sent 100,000 volts into all of my electronic equipment. He didn't contact me or anything!
What do you think, fellow /.'ers, will I win the lawsuit?
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
Once, a long long time ago, I was checking out the stats for my webpage with the Webalizer and was noticing an awful lot of referrals from eBay. Manually parsing my Apache log files I found the auction number and looked it up...
Imagine my surprise when I found it was some lamer selling burned CD's of encoded anime fansubs. Being friends with people who encode fansubs (freely) I was most put out by the fact that some scumbag was attempting to profit from it. There was only one thing I could do...
Since the lamer had linked to a (huge) wallpaper image on my site to use as his page background I did the sensible thing: renamed the wallpaper, downloaded the picture of Sting3r (the goatse guy) and stuck it in place of the wallpaper's original filename.
Needless to say eBay pulled the auction in short order, something they wouldn't have done if I'd simply cried "copyright infringement!"
That you were too lazy to copy an 800 byte image to your own server and link to that? Yes, I recognize that such tasks are a huge chore. Hell, it would probably take an hour just to download the image, and another hour reading through documentation and sending emails to support lists to figure out how to move the image to a directory you can link to, and then probably at least half an hour (again, slogging through that documentation) to figure out how to change the image link in your html document. And then there's the cost issue. Hard drives aren't cheap, and 800 bytes is almost two full sectors! Plus you have the inconvenience of having 800 bytes of storage space on your system no longer available for other uses. All around it is just a day long pain in the ass ordeal. But, once you are finally finished the good news is that your site won't be able to be defaced like that anymore.
I think there is a case about this. It's under the terms of deep linking. Zackary ( post # 3) is correct. Your only secure about the image if you have a contract for that image. Otherwise you will be subject to the other parties mood ( in your case not so good )
Also you could consider the bigger problem. Bandwidth theft. I'm not sure of the following ( i don't know of any legal cases ) but from what I have learned is: I can not take an image from your server without your permision. Even if the image is free to use ( public domain). I have to copy it from your site to mine. then I can have it on my site.
ONEPOINT
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