You care because not only did they hotlink, they went and registered their hotlink as being the authoritative source of the link with the major search engines. Imagine if all of your users who had bookmarked your site could suddenly not reach you because their bookmarks had been broken by the hotlink provider.
The problem is that that is a very intimidating amount of work for a non technical user to set up and defend their podcast.
Re:MOD PARENT UP, this guy is a tool
on
The Podjacker Threat
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem is, they made themselves out to be a directory service, not a forwarding service. A directory service maintains pointers to content, rather than forwarding content. That way delisting doesn't impace existing users of the content. TinyURL is in the forwarding business, and they make that clear.
Furthermore, the 'service' registered his show on legitimate directory services as coming from them. I can't see any way to make that look legitimate. It would be like finding out that tiny url went and registered themselves on google as being the source for your website!
And when he asked the podjacker politely to forward people for long enough to correct their bookmarks?
He requested a listing from the podjacker, not a forwarding. And he also didn't ask them to register his site elsewhere as belonging to the podjacker, which is really the core of the problem.
The problem is that the aggregator has no legitimate interest in the forwarding process. That can only serve to give them control over the non technologically adept audience members. Imagine trying to convince everyone who visits your website to check the URL by hand, particularly if it happens to be somewhat long. There's no way you'll get anyone but the 10% most techno oriented members of your audience to do that.
Re:He lost control of his statistics
on
The Podjacker Threat
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I doubt that the method of indexing was explained in the fine print. When I sign up with an indexing service, such as google, I have an expectation that they are listing my site. The advantage for them is advertising: listeners looking for shows come to their site, and they have a lot of shows if I and others participate in the bargain.
What I specifically do not expect, is for them to forward listeners to my site through a frame, keeping the bookmarks of my users for my site pointed at google. I expect that delisting from google will have no impact on existing bookmarks for my site's users, just that new users will not find my site on google.
Furthermore, the indexing service went and registered his show on other search engines, also redirecting through their site, and that definitely wasn't an expected part of the bargain. And now he's having trouble getting his listing corrected with other indexing sites, because they all think the podjacker owns the show.
Yes, he lost listeners. Or so he says, and I find it quite plausible. The problem is that many in his audience didn't know he was tied to vegan.com as it wasn't something he emphasized on his show, as he didn't know that was necessary. And searches in the main directories are still calling up the podjacker, so anyone trying to re-find his show may still not be able to re-locate him.
You got moderated high funny, but it seems like you had a legitimate question.
Podjacking is when someone registers your podcast with the major podcast search engines as coming from their site.
They then forward the podcast to your show. Maybe. Or maybe they send some other show. Or maybe they offer to let you pay them not to tell your audience that the show has been canceled. Etc. Once they own your show on the major search engines, you're pretty much beholden to them for your audience. Hopefully, the search engines will learn to correct this soon, but it doesn't solve the problem of audience members with existing bookmarks/subscriptions set up that are pointing to the wrong place.
It doesn't help him save on bandwidth because the podjacking site was forwarding the traffic. The problem is: what happens when they _stop_ forwarding the traffic? Suddenly, your audience can't connect to your show. And because you didn't know your audience was reaching you via a redirect, you may not have known you needed to tell people what your shows real address was.
Plus, do you really want to have to try to explain to your less then optimally technological audience just how to fix their rss feed?
In fact, if you read the article, this is what happened to him: the podjacker stopped forwarding his audience, and he lost a significant number of people. And because yahoo and itunes are being slow to fix his lookup, his lost audience really has no way to find him (a search on yahoo for the show turns up the podjacker, who will no longer send you the show)!
Re:He lost control of his statistics
on
The Podjacker Threat
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If you read the article, I think you'll find he has a pretty legitimate concern. Imagine if google kept url listings. Which they do:
Now imagine that they allowed anyone to register a site mapping. For example, maybe I should register www.yahoo.com, and have it forwarded through my domain. Then one day, maybe, I decide that instead of forwarding to the real yahoo site, i'll just redirect all the visitors to my own site. What's to stop me?
Only if he's going to grad school. In the real world you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who cares about the strength of a program over the strength of the overall university. You can graduate from Stanford in computer science of all things and still get employed on the strength of the Stanford name. No one cares if the comp sci program is crap. And for graduate school admissions, 90% of his leverage is going to be letters from profs + test scores. So if he's looking at grad school, he should make sure he will have those 3 letters, and it otherwise won't matter what happens to his program.
Mod the parent up. The grandparent is way off (and +5 moderation for bad information to boot!). It is far more realistic to say that ipod ripped off nomad, since nomad was released first.
Man, I worked for a company with a quarter-assed policy. I was still receiving my forwarded email 9 months after I left. I was hearing all about the top secret new projects. It was very entertaining.
Why concede the parent's point, though, it isn't correct. You assume that no person, in a bout of sudden contempt for the company, writes up his notice and hands it in. I can tell you that many if not most people who get seriously upset at their company act this way. You're just used to working with computer people, who are perhaps a little more planning and a little less emotional. People definitely hand in notice before they've had time to really think out how they could hurt the company, and so showing them the door immediately is generally a nice safe policy.
I would only make an exception if absolutely confident that the employee was leaving happy, and even then, only if I really needed them to work.
You've been banned from moderation. The editors can ban you if they don't like the way you are moderating. This usually happens for one of two reasons:
1) others metamoderation of your moderation was sufficiently bad that you popped up on the bad moderators list. 2) you moderated an editor negatively and didn't notice who you were moderating
The problem is those damn 20% who raise their kids atheist or jewish or hindu or whatever. You never know when one of those kids is going to show up at your kids school and start shooting up the place. Do you seriously want to leave the responsibility over whether your child lives or dies to other parents??? Face reality, we need laws to force parents to be responsible, and to constrain their children for the sake of ours when those parents aren't responsible.
I don't really see how it's possible for the submitter to be fake. Either he submitted the story or he didn't. Apparently, he submitted the story.
Now, he might think the joke is that he's posting 'news' from a news aggregation site to a news aggregation site, but meta news is the only kind of news slashdot gets anyway, and that's what we come here for.
All in all, if he's scamming slashdot, he can only be doing it if EurekAlert is a fake, which it certainly doesn't look like at first glance, though I notice that in an unusual move for a meta-news site, it doesn't have links to originating information. That is somewhat suspicious. Still, if true, it's an incredible effort he's putting in just to scam slashdot stories.
Yeah I'm sorry about that. If you're sufficiently interested give me a week, I'm going to remove the feature that requires a signed jar (in particular, I let you load and save games to your local disk which violates the basic security policy).
Also, you can (or should be able to: i can do it on win32/firefox) visit the game without agreeing to the security. It will just inform you that it fails if you try to load/save games.
Re:Free Punch Card
on
Why We Fight
·
· Score: 2, Funny
This is exactly why I started carrying around a small powerful xray emitter with me. When some person is a jerk to me in a way that I feel is sufficiently over the top... wham: powerful xray to the groin == no more children for him. If he has the kids with him, I zap them too to do what I can to stop those genes from getting passed on. And of course the great thing about this is that it looks like i'm just pointing a bullhorn at you. Can't get pissed off at a guy for pointing a bullhorn at you like you can if he punches you.
Slashdot Mirror
You care because not only did they hotlink, they went and registered their hotlink as being the authoritative source of the link with the major search engines. Imagine if all of your users who had bookmarked your site could suddenly not reach you because their bookmarks had been broken by the hotlink provider.
The problem is that that is a very intimidating amount of work for a non technical user to set up and defend their podcast.
The problem is, they made themselves out to be a directory service, not a forwarding service. A directory service maintains pointers to content, rather than forwarding content. That way delisting doesn't impace existing users of the content. TinyURL is in the forwarding business, and they make that clear.
Furthermore, the 'service' registered his show on legitimate directory services as coming from them. I can't see any way to make that look legitimate. It would be like finding out that tiny url went and registered themselves on google as being the source for your website!
And when he asked the podjacker politely to forward people for long enough to correct their bookmarks?
He requested a listing from the podjacker, not a forwarding. And he also didn't ask them to register his site elsewhere as belonging to the podjacker, which is really the core of the problem.
And perhaps more importantly: he also didn't ask for them to register his site elsewhere, as belonging to the podjacker rather than him.
He asked for a listing, not for a forwarding. There's a rather important difference.
The problem is that the aggregator has no legitimate interest in the forwarding process. That can only serve to give them control over the non technologically adept audience members. Imagine trying to convince everyone who visits your website to check the URL by hand, particularly if it happens to be somewhat long. There's no way you'll get anyone but the 10% most techno oriented members of your audience to do that.
I doubt that the method of indexing was explained in the fine print. When I sign up with an indexing service, such as google, I have an expectation that they are listing my site. The advantage for them is advertising: listeners looking for shows come to their site, and they have a lot of shows if I and others participate in the bargain.
What I specifically do not expect, is for them to forward listeners to my site through a frame, keeping the bookmarks of my users for my site pointed at google. I expect that delisting from google will have no impact on existing bookmarks for my site's users, just that new users will not find my site on google.
Furthermore, the indexing service went and registered his show on other search engines, also redirecting through their site, and that definitely wasn't an expected part of the bargain. And now he's having trouble getting his listing corrected with other indexing sites, because they all think the podjacker owns the show.
Yes, he lost listeners. Or so he says, and I find it quite plausible. The problem is that many in his audience didn't know he was tied to vegan.com as it wasn't something he emphasized on his show, as he didn't know that was necessary. And searches in the main directories are still calling up the podjacker, so anyone trying to re-find his show may still not be able to re-locate him.
You got moderated high funny, but it seems like you had a legitimate question.
Podjacking is when someone registers your podcast with the major podcast search engines as coming from their site.
They then forward the podcast to your show. Maybe. Or maybe they send some other show. Or maybe they offer to let you pay them not to tell your audience that the show has been canceled. Etc. Once they own your show on the major search engines, you're pretty much beholden to them for your audience. Hopefully, the search engines will learn to correct this soon, but it doesn't solve the problem of audience members with existing bookmarks/subscriptions set up that are pointing to the wrong place.
It doesn't help him save on bandwidth because the podjacking site was forwarding the traffic. The problem is: what happens when they _stop_ forwarding the traffic? Suddenly, your audience can't connect to your show. And because you didn't know your audience was reaching you via a redirect, you may not have known you needed to tell people what your shows real address was.
Plus, do you really want to have to try to explain to your less then optimally technological audience just how to fix their rss feed?
In fact, if you read the article, this is what happened to him: the podjacker stopped forwarding his audience, and he lost a significant number of people. And because yahoo and itunes are being slow to fix his lookup, his lost audience really has no way to find him (a search on yahoo for the show turns up the podjacker, who will no longer send you the show)!
If you read the article, I think you'll find he has a pretty legitimate concern. Imagine if google kept url listings. Which they do:
o m&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=o rg.mozilla:en-US:official
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.yahoo.c
Now imagine that they allowed anyone to register a site mapping. For example, maybe I should register www.yahoo.com, and have it forwarded through my domain. Then one day, maybe, I decide that instead of forwarding to the real yahoo site, i'll just redirect all the visitors to my own site. What's to stop me?
That's the problem with podjacking.
Only if he's going to grad school. In the real world you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who cares about the strength of a program over the strength of the overall university. You can graduate from Stanford in computer science of all things and still get employed on the strength of the Stanford name. No one cares if the comp sci program is crap. And for graduate school admissions, 90% of his leverage is going to be letters from profs + test scores. So if he's looking at grad school, he should make sure he will have those 3 letters, and it otherwise won't matter what happens to his program.
That's almost exactly what went through my head.
I wonder what portion of slashdotters has no clue what you're talking about though.
Mod the parent up. The grandparent is way off (and +5 moderation for bad information to boot!). It is far more realistic to say that ipod ripped off nomad, since nomad was released first.
No kidding. My friend went through this, and spent well over 200 hours fixing all the problems it caused him.
Man, I worked for a company with a quarter-assed policy. I was still receiving my forwarded email 9 months after I left. I was hearing all about the top secret new projects. It was very entertaining.
Why concede the parent's point, though, it isn't correct. You assume that no person, in a bout of sudden contempt for the company, writes up his notice and hands it in. I can tell you that many if not most people who get seriously upset at their company act this way. You're just used to working with computer people, who are perhaps a little more planning and a little less emotional. People definitely hand in notice before they've had time to really think out how they could hurt the company, and so showing them the door immediately is generally a nice safe policy.
I would only make an exception if absolutely confident that the employee was leaving happy, and even then, only if I really needed them to work.
You've been banned from moderation. The editors can ban you if they don't like the way you are moderating. This usually happens for one of two reasons:
1) others metamoderation of your moderation was sufficiently bad that you popped up on the bad moderators list.
2) you moderated an editor negatively and didn't notice who you were moderating
The problem is those damn 20% who raise their kids atheist or jewish or hindu or whatever. You never know when one of those kids is going to show up at your kids school and start shooting up the place. Do you seriously want to leave the responsibility over whether your child lives or dies to other parents??? Face reality, we need laws to force parents to be responsible, and to constrain their children for the sake of ours when those parents aren't responsible.
Maybe the smarter you are the less interested you are in being a society drone all your life. Hence the lack of correspondence on that scale.
A more interesting question might be: how well does it correspond to the multi generational success of your genetics.
I don't really see how it's possible for the submitter to be fake. Either he submitted the story or he didn't. Apparently, he submitted the story.
d =844
Now, he might think the joke is that he's posting 'news' from a news aggregation site to a news aggregation site, but meta news is the only kind of news slashdot gets anyway, and that's what we come here for.
All in all, if he's scamming slashdot, he can only be doing it if EurekAlert is a fake, which it certainly doesn't look like at first glance, though I notice that in an unusual move for a meta-news site, it doesn't have links to originating information. That is somewhat suspicious. Still, if true, it's an incredible effort he's putting in just to scam slashdot stories.
Further, it would have to be a long term scam plan, since the UKY story in particular is real:
http://news.uky.edu/news/display_article.php?arti
So at best he's trying to build credibility as an article submitter for a later scam.
Yeah I'm sorry about that. If you're sufficiently interested give me a week, I'm going to remove the feature that requires a signed jar (in particular, I let you load and save games to your local disk which violates the basic security policy).
Also, you can (or should be able to: i can do it on win32/firefox) visit the game without agreeing to the security. It will just inform you that it fails if you try to load/save games.
This is exactly why I started carrying around a small powerful xray emitter with me. When some person is a jerk to me in a way that I feel is sufficiently over the top ... wham: powerful xray to the groin == no more children for him. If he has the kids with him, I zap them too to do what I can to stop those genes from getting passed on. And of course the great thing about this is that it looks like i'm just pointing a bullhorn at you. Can't get pissed off at a guy for pointing a bullhorn at you like you can if he punches you.
With the surgical removal of the larynx, your company can be protected from this attack as well.