Slashdot Mirror
Online Publisher Blocks LinuxToday Referrals
MadChicken writes "This weekend, LinuxToday found that their link to an article was blocked by CMP Media LLC (publishers of Information Week). The editorial with full details is here. Could this have impact on other online news sites?"
The cynic within immediately asks 'who gains ?' from reducing the number of users on your site by denying traffic from what is essentially a free referral service. It doesn't seem to make any sense... If the story was being copied verbatim, and the source-site was losing ad revenue then there's just cause to block the copying site, but in this case Linux Today is only posting excerpts containing links ...
So, what gain can there be ? Does the process of having an outcry against you, then acquiescing to public demand (becoming a 'good guy' again) give you a sufficiently high profile that it's worth losing some page-views temporarily ? I think that it might....
Simon the cynic.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I see this all the time when people want to stop "leeching." Clearly this isn't a "leeching" situation, but rather a "deep linking" situation, but isn't it the right of the site-op to just redirect referrers from outside?
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
I think the real dream is to see if your site could withstand a slashdotting. As we've seen before, only the largest sites make it through a huge spike in traffic. I've always wondered if my site could handle it. Hostrocket is my provider and I think they have pretty substantial bandwidth and higher-end servers.
If you want to add a few "hits" to my page and see lots of good deals on electronics, Click here.
This kind of silent blocking of a referrer does nothing but hurt the blocking site. If their point was that they dont want their material reproduced on another site, this block doesn't stop that - actually it encourages more if it since the site in question cant link to the original material. They are well within their rights but it doesnt seem like a very good strategy for a company who depends so much on the internet community.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
Can I tell my brower not to tell that I'm following a link when I enter a site?
Wouldn't that solve the problem?
Evolution of Language Through The Ages: 6000 BC : ungh, grrf, booga 2000 AD : grep, awk, sed
I've already set such things up on some sites which might get /.:ed; basically it means that all people surfing to these sites from a page at /. will get a static snapshot of the contents... it's the same contents, just up to 30 minutes old and without it killing the databases etc. =)
perl -e'print$_{$_} for sort%_=`lynx -dump svanstrom.com/t`'
We've (well, many others and I) have always said that if you don't want people linking to you, configure your web server to block it -- it's not difficult. CMP has done this.
But even though they have the right to do something, that doesn't mean that they should. I don't know anymore more about this story than the LinuxToday editorial, but after reading it, I definately believe that LinuxToday did nothing wrong (what they did certainly does fall under the category of `Fair Use'), and reacted accordingly when they discovered the block -- except that I saw no mention of CMP being contact. Perhaps they were contacted and it just didn't make it into the editorial, but if not, they should have been. It could have just been a misunderstanding or misconfiguration, though the message seen does suggest otherwise.
I predict that CMP will change their configuration shortly, probably due in large part to the LinuxToday editorial and this /. article. We'll see if I'm right ...
I swear that some of these kinds of decisions are made by people with grilled cheese for brains.
It is unfathomable to me that someone would block incoming traffic to an article on their website. Maybe redirect the visitor to the home if it's that necessary to force people to come in through the "front door," as it were, but to make the visitor feel like he's intruding somehow... that just seems pretty dumb to me.
Website operators need to think about how what they do is perceived by visitors, the same way hotel operators and shopping mall operators think about it. Don't make visitors feel unwelcome, for Pete's sake!
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Heh, nice. Server still seems to be responding well, and I have noticed a definite increase in visitors. The most ever visitors I had online in a 5 minute span was 92. I have 35 online now.
--
Electronics deals gathered in real-time from over 25 sources
The referrer field is, especially when it is used to act against my interest (by blocking access to something), my own browser being hostile toward me. Without the active participation of my _own_ browser, they would not be able to block me from accessing the site. This is on the level of DRM, and ought not be acceptable in the free software world.
Now, in mozilla you can turn of referrer all together, but that is not good enough, because then they can simpyl start blocking access to deep pages when there is no referrer (this will create problems for instance for emailed links, but I know some sites do it (porn...)).
So mozilla needs to go further to assist it's users, rather than be party restrictions on them. My software should serve me, and me alone. Here is what it needs:
- Always set "Referrer" to the root of the host.
- Always set "Referrer" to one directory above the current page.
- And, most importantly, support for an html extension where the "a" tag (or any other, now that other things can be links) has a parameter that tells the browser referrer to use. So that Mozilla could be set to respect links like this:
<a href="http://slashdot.org" referrer="http://www.google.com">
and then set the HTTP referrer field accordingly. That way the browser would not betraying me my providing the source of my link to the destination site, so that they can use it against me.
= 9J =
It's well known that the #1 factor in the Google PageRank sorting routine is the count of links to your page from sites that have no relation to you. Therefore, blocking other site's refererals will just lead to them not to linking you, and your placement in Google to drop.
Privoxy. It works on MacOS X, Windows, Linux, etc.
Employing some form of anti-slashdot mechanism is entirely justified: the issue here is that you're legitimately addressing an economic/cost/resource problem (although, your approach is a little weak: you should employ some form of request rate limiting as the slashdot effect can occur from other sources). You have a right to do this.
However, simply blocking references by origin with no specific justification, especially when that origin is pursing a similar field of operation sounds very anti-trust: i.e. refusal to supply.
Most of us aren't discussing whether they can, we're discussing whether they ought to.
This is not a good idea. Several sites *require* the referer to be passed for proper site navigation. For example, form submission pages may use the referer to redirect you back to where you started after you submit. Turning off the referer breaks this functionality.
It'd be nicer if Mozilla/Firebird had an option to block the referer in the right menu. You'd right-click on a URL, and have one of the options be "Visit URL without passing referer".
...could that be developed into a generic anti-slashdotting? I.e. you simply keep count of the referrers, which you got spare power to do before the real crunch starts... if load gets too high, issue static pages to the top referrer(s).Hmm 30secs of thinking, but it definately sounds patentable :D.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
True, unless they block anything that wasn't refered from one of their own pages. (Weird, but possible.) As for the "repost of article text" type cut'n'paste, it's sad when someone does that with a major news site, even posted as an anonymous coward to avoid karma. They're damned unlikely to be slashdotted and newspapers and writers are still going through legal fights over web and archive rights, so they're touchy about the subject.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
FWIW, here's the URL for Xitami. It's a free web server for win32 and it works rather well (including a web-based configuration interface).
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
you know what would be a great plugin for mozila.
To make the referer the actual link that you are going to, ie, if i clink on foo.com on slashdot make the referer foo.com in mozilla errr firebird errr firefox errr anything else they might like to rename their fine product too.
You mean copyright infringment. Theft is criminal law, publising someone elses paper without permission is civil law.
I don't know about the rest of ya'll but this really doesn't surprise me in the least given my experience with them. I subscribe to Sysadm Mag. Ever since I subscribed I've been getting spam for all their other magazines. The spam always comes from email-publisher.com, better known as the spammers at topica.com. Why CMP is using a known spammer's services I have no idea. I've tried unsubscribing to no avail. If it wasn't for Sysadm Mag and a few of their other nice mags I'd tell them to stick it.
I've ignored these guys since.
iksrazal
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." Stephen Hawking
It seems to me that controlling deep linking is entirely justifiable, as deep links can make unfair use of your site or misrepresent your site and deprive you (e.g. by avoiding advertising and appropriate attribution for materials or terms and conditions of use).
You could make a good argument that your "web page" is the work, and a deep link effectively misappropriates that work causing a substantial part of it to be rendered as a new work: clearly an infringement of your copyright.
Well the most important thing to take away from the article is that stuff like this is going to happen more and more.
.. but with the digital world, third parties have more power over you than maybe they should. It completely changes the dynamics of society in subtle ways. Nothing is static any more, not even a news article. This is just a small example of "what's to come".
... it should read "information wants to be controlled by someone more powerful than you".
Stuff like this doesn't happen in real life.. you can read a newspaper wherever and whenever you want
"Information wants to be free" is not correct
I went to the articel url posted in the comments here, and at the bottom of the page I noticed a link saying "Licence this Article". Clicking it provides a pop-up window which lets me get a "Quick Price" (SM?) on how much I should pay for re-distributing the article. If I want to link to the article from my corporate or academic website, the cost is $2.50. If I want to email a link to the article to one friend, the price is $5.00. This despite the fact that there's a link at the top of the article which apparently lets you email it for free. This service is provided to CMP Publishing by an outfit calling itself the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. They are at www.copyright.com. *Sigh*
(1) If you can't afford to pay, then don't play. Isn't this what bandwidth caps are for? What about the back up plan for those sites that can't handle the traffic but need to be up? Sounds like poor planning to me.
(2) News sites like CMP are mostlikely ad revenue driven as is evidenced from their pages which are chock full of ads. They are also trying to sell you a subscription to their print edition and get you to sign up for newsletters, etc. Blocking people from coming to this site because they are "not authorized redistributors" is a demonstration of a fatal missunderstanding of how the internet works. Once a person puts up a web page, they have published information for the general public to consume. Trying to limit that based upon "authorization" is wrong. A link is not a redistribution of the content, anymore than someone telling you about a great book that they read. If links are redistributions of content, then the whole of the internet is likely to be in violation of the Copyright Laws under the Berne Convention.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons