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AOL Blocks Links from LiveJournal
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."
It's optional, so browsers don't need to send it. Mozilla/Firebird/etc (and Opera) can be easily modified to not send one, and the Google Toolbar could probably support blocking them, too (since IE isn't being updated). AOL is a big enough presence that this could have a significant impact on peoples' browsing.
Gotta love Opera :)
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Anything that discourages "blogging" can't be all bad.
Actually, you may want to investigate whether or not AOL has gone live with their blog offering ( article here). If so, it may be viewed as an intentional act.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Could you get around this using tinyurl? I'm not sure if it changes the HTTP_REFERRER or not.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
This is a really level-headed, well played move on LJ's part - primarily because they're following the universal principle of assuming stupidity before malice. ;)
The Free desktop that Just Works
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...
TODO: Something witty here...
It wouldn't help people with embedded links to images at AOL, but at least it could get people to AOL without any additional clicking.
Well not the whole AOL network, but the former mozilla division blocked links from slashdot (and still does), (Example). Any sites that cause major bandwidth use should be blocked, I'm sure some frequest slashdotters get the infamous Pink page of death.
...that people bend over backwards to accomodate companies with draconian policies like AOL? If I were running an ISP, the loss of a few customers because they suddenly discovered they could no longer send e-mail to AOL customers through no fault of my own would most likely be offset by new customers who understand that the earth does not revolve around AOL. So they're blocking incoming HTTP traffic based on referrer? Are there not more pressing problems to attend to rather than trying to please the AOL gods?
I'm not saying AOL is in the right. I'm simply saying that AOL (and companies like them) should be made to lie in the bed they make for themselves. Only when AOL customers start to be inconvenienced by AOL's own policies (rather than third parties patching together "workarounds" in a misguided attempt to protect the integrity of AOL) will they realize what AOL is up to...
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.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Unfortunately, this trick really only works with MSIE. But it's better than nothing.The above should all be on one line. Check for extra white space where the line feed got placed by Slashdot's bug (thanks alot).
It should be strip_referrer.js with no space. Why does Slashdot do that??
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Well, if I were an AOL user right now (quite a stretch to imagine, I'm afraid), I'd be loving to check my contract to see if it provides for such limitations on user personal space. If not, I'd call to complain (I'd probably do that anyway, right before I called my new ISP). I know that my cable modem "free" hosted space included has a very specific contract that limits the monthly bandwidth usage, but does not mention anything about blocking access for links or clicks from other domains. I wouldn't be happy if they suddenly started returning 404 Page Not Found errors when anyone linked or clicked from foo.com.
;)
/. editors checked this out somehow. I don't have AOL space. Can anyone else verify this is true and not just some EBKAC or hoax?
Maybe they can claim technical difficulties if called on it, or maybe the contract does let them yank their users around like this. I don't know. Does anyone here use AOL and will admit it long enogh to post a link or copy of the appropriate contract?
Of course, there's the tinfoil-hat theory that AOL is planning to start thier own blogging service and wants to drag LiveJournal down from it's #1 spot a bit. Seems like a particularly blatant and non-clever way to do this though, or maybe that's the "beauty" of the whole ingenious plot?
Finally, I'm going to hope the
everything in moderation
I, for one, like the referer heading. It is useful to see where traffic is coming from and it really stinks that AOL is going to encourage people to mess with it, remove it, or spoof it. This will be the ONLY result of AOL's action. They may get a short break from livejournal links but people will work around it. The internet is about linking after all. If AOL want's to invent their own thing with their own rules they should make their own little private net like they used to have and they can remain one tight, happy, cloistered little clique. Of course if the referer header becomes useless maybe it would be a good opportunity to fix one of the most influential spelling errors in recent time and start using the refeRRer header instead.
That should AOL continue to block deep-linking (which they have the right to do so assuming that there is no contradictory clause in a user's contract) they should at least redirect users to a page explaining what is actually going on rather than leaving them to complain to LJ support.
A lot of websites let you bounce to other sites. Here are some demonstations
Debian link to aol.com
Yahoo link to aol.com
Google link to aol.com
Goatse link (yes, its true, goatse is useful!) to aol.com
Hopefully, unless AOL wants to block the internet off, people will get around, and we can always set up p2p based redirection system (ala freenet). To get trough.
When AOL needed help setting up their blogging software, who did they talk to? People like Dave Winer and other members of the net community.
So shouldn't there be some sort of Karma here where we, the blogging community, ostracize a bad player. They do it to spammers all the time, why not to the big guys. They'll eventually realize that it's not profitable to do so, and conform.
We could choose to disallow AOL urls into weblogs. We could prevent anybody with an AOL account having an RSS feed to a Blogger or LiveJournal. We could ban them from our conferences. Sounds like we're being assholes or "closed" by doing so, but I think it's important for people to check the bully to in the long-term enable the most openess possible.
Philosophistry
Heh. Uh, AOL has more than enough bandwidth to handle freekin *livejournal linkage*....
When I worked there (Netscape), we had 5 OC-48s in our building alone. OC-12s & DS-3 circuits for "redundancy."
I highly doubt that it has anything to do with bandwidth.
My more centrist side says...
My cynical side says...
Hey look! It's Triangle Man!
Unfortunately, killing the referer header breaks alot of sites which are blocking image pointing. We (KeenSpace) just put in header checking. We do it so that if a request for an image isn't from a webpage we host (eazy stuff to do), it's 404'ed.
We cut our bandwith by 50% that way.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
...welcome our new AOL overlords.
I'm getting a ritual circumcision as required by AOL CEO Levin as we speakKKKKALRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
Stupidity like this won't affect me at all. I use the Proxomitron, and I have the referrer field set to \u (which I think is the default setting). \u inserts the current URL into the referrer field. So, for example, if I hit a link on www.slashdot.org/foo.htm to www.aol.com/foo.htm, the Proxomitron will send www.aol.com/foo.htm and not www.slashdot.org/foo.htm to the server. This is especially helpful for sites that return 404's to requests with blank referrers (since the server always thinks the request is coming from its domain when in reality it may not be.)
Reprise the theme song and roll the credits!
Cheapasses is right. You get what you pay for, and if you're paying for impossible things, you should beware the catch. There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth, or unlimited space...merely limits that you haven't hit yet.
A t1 line is still over $700 per month, so burstable bandwidth starts at more than $2 per gigabyte. People who are on better pipes pay way less, of course, but then again they need to maintain them, and technicians start at about $25 per hour. Servers need to be powered, backed up and maintained to prevent hackattacks. So when somebody offers you unlimited bandwidth, unlimited space, unlimited email with 24x7 support for a pretty number like $7.77 or $5.55 or whatever, they're basically lying to you.
Check your AUP. Somewhere in there you'll find a line saying that your unlimited bandwidth can be terminated at any time if you use too much of it. Unlimited really means "We're not telling you the limits. But you'll know when you hit them." Generally because your site takes off. You get popular, people start laughing at your jokes and caring about your weblog. Then your provider cuts the cord. Sucks, don't it?
See, ISPs at all levels make money by overselling. They tell you you have a T1, when really it's fractional. They tell you you have 256 kbit upstream, then it maxes at 192. The most egregious example of this is the El-Cheapo webhost, an animal I despised so much that I started my own crummy service to combat it. If you have the know-how, and you have the time, I suggest you do the same. It can be a lot of fun and offsets the cost of big web projects. Just don't harbor any dreams of getting stinko rich.
I remember the first time I had a site get "overnight popular." It was a certain web comic that we begged to come on board. In about two weeks ge went from moving 2 gig a month to over 50. And because we small timers get the short end of the bandwidth stick, his bill was about $200. Not his bill FROM us, but the bill TO us from our host for just his transfer. We didn't mark it up. That's a lot of money when you're a hobbiest. Shit, that was as much as we paid for everybody else's bandwidth that month.
We have a policy of not touching people's sites or restricting tranfer, but if we hadn't known the guy (and known he was good for the money, which his new fans donated in droves, we even threw in $30), we probably would have had to use the "no contract" clause and take the site offline. Damned if I'm paying for somebody else's popularity...
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Well, for one thing, AOL has been "broken" in many ways for many years, and yet they still have an enormous and loyal user base. So does Windows, for that matter.
The problem is that for the average AOL user, who to put it bluntly is probably both too stupid to figure this out on their own and too lazy to read LiveJournal's explanation, it will appear just as likely that LiveJournal is "broken", not AOL. They will squeal "OMG WTF IT DONT WORK!!!!!1!!!11!!!
This is how the fragile and complex interoperability between pieces of computer software, which is opaque to most users, can subvert the workings of the free marketplace; if company A sabotages their product so that it won't work with company B's product, it is easy for customers to be fooled into blaming company B.
Microsoft did this with their implementation of Java, and probably many other times. I doubt if this is some deliberate strategy on AOL's part, but the result will probably be the same regardless.
Ubi dubium, ibi libertas.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
I don't have a problem with <obligatoryDerisiveness> AOhelL </obligatoryDerisiveness> preventing people from leeching images from their site, but there's a simple way to get around their prevention of direct links to their site: redirect using a META tag, which strips the referer header and makes it look like a direct request.
..... in the header of myPage2.html, include this meta tag:
For example:
If you want to link from livejournal.com/myPage1.html to members.aol.com/~myOtherPage.html, then make the link go to livejournal.com/myPage2.html
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://members.aol.com/~myOtherPage.html">
It works accross all browsers and appears to AOL as if somebody just typed that URL directly into the address bar of their browser.
My, undereducated guess is that AOL's done this because they have their own homogenated, cuticized, totally non-open-slammed-shut, AOL blogs. Yes, folks! According to their information:
"Everyone has a story to tell; what's yours? Create an AOL Journal about your summer vacation, being pregnant or trying to find a new job. AOL makes it easy, fast and fun!"
"Get Started Today
Create a Journal
Build your own blog
with our cool tools. "
It's all right there. I didn't have the heart to actually check out the blogs.
What do we need with an open-source, customizable system like LJ's, complete with lively, growing user communities? Who needs software that might foster an actual original thought? Interacting with strangers is so...icky! We can pay lots of money instead to record our sanitized inmost feelings on the AOL version.
They're probably staying awake nights figuring out how to block links from independent systems like Moveable Type. Could Slashdot be far behind?
Anne
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