AOL Blocks Links from LiveJournal

Evan Martin writes "LiveJournal.com is an open-source weblog site with over a million users, some of whom use AOL. Last week, AOL began blocking all HTTP requests with "www.livejournal.com" Referer headers. This is a common practice by image hosting sites to prevent off-site linking of their images and 'bandwidth theft'. However, in AOL's case, they're blocking everything, not just images, effectively breaking all links to any AOL member's site--but only from LiveJournal. To be clear: nobody on LiveJournal can even make a link to any AOL member site without getting a '404 Not Found' error. We've also heard reports of the same thing happening on AOL properties (Netscape, Compuserve). This concerns us because we have to deal with the support requests: it worked in the past for our users, and it continues to work for other sites, so our users think it's our fault."

Martin continues: "We've tried to contact AOL three different ways, all without success. We've also told our users to contact their tech support. At one point, an AOL staffer pointed out that FTP access still worked (which is probably because FTP has no "Referrer" concept), and so, as an interim fix, we're rewriting all HTTP URLs to use FTP on the AOL properties where that works instead. This means that users can again host their images on the AOL webspace they're paying for, but more importantly, it means they can simply link to their webpage.

We wouldn't be so upset if they were simply blocking images. Bandwidth use is a valid concern, after all, and we even provide step-by-step instructions for people to configure their webservers to prevent image "theft". However, because they're blocking all access, including regular links, this looks like it's either a mistake, or something more insidious (the conspiracy theorists have pointed out that AOL has just launched their own competing weblog product, also based on "journals").

Although CI Host sued AOL recently for being blocked, we really don't want to do that. We still suspect that this was all just a mistake, and hopefully, by making this public, we'll manage to get their attention, since all our previous attempts have failed."

Comments

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[Tyler Eaves]

Any else noticed that members.aol.com is sending an invalid content-type header?

I've seen iso8859 and text/iso8859-html, neither of which Firebird likes...

Wait a minute

[s20451]

Anytime there's an article that whines about deep linking, a few dozen people post replies saying that the company could use the referer header to block all such requests. Now that a company is actually doing it, it's suddenly a bad idea. Which is it -- good technical solution or bad censorship?

I should also point out that some sites automatically block slashdot.org referers as a matter of self protection.

And AOL wonders why.....

[HutchGeek]

Seriously - they wonder why they get such a bad rap from the internet community at large. Most likey what has happend is that "Upper Management" made the decision to do it for some reason (although the journal conspiracy sounds quite probable), and they did't bother to ask the "real staff" what kind of an impact it would have. Now, once again, they've managed to piss a whole lot of people off. Makes you wonder what else they've blocked (censored) that thier users don't know about. I've heard rumblings on NANOG that they are trying to whitelist thier email too. There's a bright idea - a customer base the size AOL has, and their gonna whitelist mailservers. and my cutsomers wonder why I get ready to slap them when they suggest using AOL for a provider.