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Amazon and eBay Images Broken By Photobucket's 'Ransom Demand' (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Thousands of images promoting goods sold on Amazon and other shopping sites have been removed after a photo-sharing service changed its terms. Ebay and Etsy have also been affected, in addition to many forums and blogs. The problem has been caused by Photobucket introducing a charge for allowing images hosted on its platform to be embedded into third-party sites. The company caught many of its members unaware with the change, prompting some to accuse it of holding them to ransom. Denver-based Photobucket is now seeking a $399 annual fee from those who wish to continue using it for "third-party hosting" and is facing a social media backlash as a consequence.
"Host your own data! Eschew 'The Cloud'!"
Because if you sell a lot of items on a number of different platforms it makes more sense to upload the images once and then link to them from the various platforms.
Its hard to really blame Photobucket, if the images are embedded everywhere then they have no opportunity to show ads and fund servers. People using them for commercial purposes have no justification for complaints other than lack of notice.
I don't have many issues with someone charging for what has effectively been free hosting. However, the last time I was there Photobucket looked like a giant clusterfuck. 'You need to enable javascript to view the image even though it's already been loaded in the background and we're just not showing it', etc.
If photobucket tries anything too extreme to make money, they're going to be dumped in favor of literally any other service that isn't completely awful.
Unfortunately that other computer has a much easier to use interface than mine. Probably more redundancy than mine. They have a cool website where I can access data from anywhere... unlike mine.
It's not just someone else's computer. It's the computer belonging to someone who is far better at working with computers than I am. /idiot user mode.
Okay so I run Owncloud / Seafile on mine on a zfs zpool with an offsite backup. But I'm not going to pretend that it didn't take me a long time and a lot of learning to get to that point.
My girlfriend on the otherhand just booted up Windows 10 and dragged some files into the folder called Onedrive. Those "other people's computers" sure sound tempting.