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You Can't Link Here
An anonymous reader writes "Last year several news sources reported about the website dontlink.com from David Sorkin, associate professor of law at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago. His website fights 'stupid linking policies' that attempt to impose restrictions on other sites that link to them. Now a German law student joined the fight against linking restrictions and starts getting media attention in Germany. His list of stupid German linking policies can be found at the website Links & Law. Contrary to the model of dontlink.com, the German site refrains from linking to companies that prohibit linking without their consent. The site only states the URL of the websites with the linking policies.
The page with the linking policies is in German, but the rest of the website is in English and covers many legal aspects of linking."
If this has already been posted, please mod /. as slower than poo. If not, enjoy the whore.
Whore!
Kuro5hin has a very insightfull article about the ethics of linkage.
Check this out
I don't get it. Why do they even have linking policies. A simple few lines of code in the top of the page could check the referrer and if it was from "outside" then redirect them. Problem solved.
You can also so do this for frames with javascript. A few lines would check to see if the page was in a frame and if it was it moves out of the frame.
I have implemented both these solutions. I am so sick of threats in policies and EULAs. If you dont want people coming into your house just lock freaking the door. Simple as that.
there are several ways to block unwanted links to a server. you can prevent x-linking of pictures or detect a link from an other site with the http-referer.
l ">
;-)
BUT.
insead of linking directly to an other page you can use this:
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1; url=http://www.forbidden.to/link/to/this/page.htm
this will generate no referer. or to put it differently, the referer looks the same as if it were a bookmark. ans if you would stop people from bookmarking your site you're really stupid
Privacy is terrorism.
>how can I block those HTTP refferer things?
they are presented to a cgi script in the HTTP_REFERER environmental variable
>Does the browser produce them?
yes
>It has to, right?
no. and even if it does, there's no guarentee it's valid. it's trivial to fake.
>Are there any browsers out there that allow you to "play" with that information?
most "downloaders" let you set it explicitly. wget can.
i have seen browsers which slap a simple interface around the IE engine that allow you to explicitly set the referer. can't find them now, of course.
>Why not simply put the destination site into every referrer you send? You'd be telling the site that you've already be there.
indeed. when i'm leeching stuff with wget, this is exactly what i do.
>I can't think of any specific reason to do that, just a fun exercise.
some sites still use it as a means of authentication.
a lot of sites that host, uh, pictures, require referer to be sent on the image request to stop other sites linking directly to the images.
nostrils
There's a simple and standard way to tell search sites not to link to portions of your web site. It's the "robots.txt" file. It allows you to restrict access to your URLs by all or specific search programs. All of the established search sites read this file and honor its contents.
It has a lot of valid uses. On one site where I have a lot of cgi scripts, there's a "tmp" directory used for the usual purpose. Its contents are deleted after an hour. Indexing this directory is pointless, since the data will go away so soon, so the robots.txt file tells all searchers to not bother searching it.
Any site that seriously wants to keep part of its material out of the search sites' databases has a tool that does exactly this, and almost all search sites will honor it.
--
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.