Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

Hi,

If you’re reading this message then it probably means one of two things:

  1. You’re one of the people who are regularly exposed to my blog writing, in which case “hello, again!”

  2. You’re one of the people who has encountered the magical link which has brought you to this page.

The reason for the latter possibility, leading to who you are and why you’re here is what interests me; you see, I run a reasonably popular website and blog. It’s not as famous as Tim Bray‘s or Danny O’Brien‘s blogs, but it’s a little more notorious than most.

One of the things that I enjoy doing with my website is posting links to the pictures that I take, and over the last few months one of them has become immensely more popular than I ever imagined.

/users/alecm/albums/2005-london-1/di-img-3581,orig.jpg

Banksy: Winston Churchill Girl, With Balloon
[www.banksy.co.uk]

In fact during October 2005 my website took a daily average of about 17500 hits, causing about 398Mb of daily traffic on the network. In certain ways, this is pretty impressive.

However, some 20% of this traffic was/is caused by that image, although it comprised only 6% of the actual hits; some basic logfile analysis suggest that more than 350 other blogs and sites link to this image, and frankly I’d rather that they used someone else’s bandwidth, not mine.

Apart from anything else, it skews my logfile trend analysis.

So here’s the deal:

1) if you’re not the owner of the website who uses this image / led you to this message, please alert them to this matter.

2) if you are the website owner want to continue to use the picture on your website, you may make a copy of it in your website homedir, and you may use it on your website as you wish so long as you post the following citation:

Picture from London Thames Southbank by (c) Alec Muffett 2005 http://www.crypticide.com/dropsafe/
Picture of a graffito by Banksy, http://www.banksy.co.uk/

That’s it. Nice and simple. I don’t want to bust anyone’s chops about this – to do so would be self-defeating – plus I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun.

“Master” copies may be downloaded from [www.crypticide.com]

Take care, have fun, enjoy life.

Obligatory Security Perspective: By changing my own website I just changed the content on 350+ other peoples’ websites – people who elected to integrate my content, mostly without explicit consent. Scary, huh? Viral marketing, JPEG decoder viruses, advertising, and other rather more unpleasant stuff would all be possibilities. Frankly, even this is not a terribly secure thing to be doing, especially given use of an intermediate redirection website.

⊞

Comments

22 responses to “Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?”

  1. alecm
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    The linking process in context, take a look at:

    http http://www.myspace.com/coolwithac (midi music background)

    http http://www.cankusum.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=396

    http guerrigliaurbana.splinder.com/

    http http://www.xanga.com/hilaryMAE

    …and the list continues.

    Reply
  2. Chris Samuel
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    How about just diverting requests for images which do not have crypticide as the referrer ? Seen that done before..

    You could put it on Flickr and HTTP redirect them to that.

    Chris

    Reply
  3. alecm
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    Yeah, but where’s the fun in that?

    In any case that would purely be addressing the symptoms, not the issue, and have no educational effect.

    Reply
  4. Chris Samuel
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    Got interrupted half way through that comment, I meant to write that you could redirect them to the tinyurl image.

    Then say “or you could redirect them to Flickr..”.

    But I didn’t, so there. 🙂

    Anyway, if you were truly evil there would be a host of things you could do..

    Reply
  5. 66.32.185.189
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    okay that is cool I will surely do so… GOD BLESS -Lyon

    Reply
  6. alecm
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    Amazing. My daily bandwidth yesterday dropped by 70Mb, and the hit rate went up…

    Reply
  7. ac nickley
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    I really like that image, but to be honest i am dissapointed that you would recall it from my sight because you want credit for the photograph. I think that is really petty… The artist who actually painted that deserves credit, and you don’t see his/her name spray painted on the wall or anything. I really think you should reconsider your demand for recognition. I am fortunate to have seen that image on your site, and I am thankful for that. I mean you no disrespect, I just feel that art should be free.

    nickleyac@borealisweb.com

    Reply
  8. alecm
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    Evidently you feel that other peoples’ bandwidth should be free and used to support your website, too. Or maybe you just didn’t read what I wrote.

    Reply
  9. alecm
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    ps: if you want to credit the artist, then buy his book and don’t whine at me:

    http http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844137864/

    Banksy gets plenty of credit on this website. Get over it.

    Reply
  10. Chris Samuel
    Copying an image without permission is legally dubious without permission though..

    Actually, I think that it’s likely that to have copied that photo without your express permission would have been a copyright infringement.

    I believe that fair use in the US, for instance, does not permit you to copy a complete work such as a photo (though of course you should consult a lawyer for a proper opinion, IANAL, and these things only get settled for certain in court).

    As the BitLaw website says about precisely this thing:

    [quote] The moment an original image (or string of text) is fixed on a hard drive for the first time, it is protected by copyright. Any unauthorized copying of a protected image is an infringement of the creator’s copyright [/quote]

    Hence they were probably doing the only thing that they could legitimately have done in the absence of some explicit license to copy.

    Unfortunately because copyright law varies so much from country to country (for instance I strongly suspect it would have been illegal for me in Australia to copy that image onto my website without you having posted that permission, hell I can’t even legally copy CD’s I own onto my iPod here) it’s really hard for me to get annoyed with folks linking instead of copying..

    cheers,

    Chris

    Reply
  11. Chris Samuel
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    I believe that prior to you permitting people to copy that image they were doing the only thing they could legally do..

    Reply
  12. alecm
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    And that would stop your average teenager, how precisely?

    Reply
  13. Chris Samuel
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    Nothing, the fact that people going through that stage of human development seem to have impaired executive function due to neurological changes that happen then does not seem to have much correlation to the pecuniary value of certain species of piscis. 🙂

    Just pointing out it doesn’t make much sense to get angry at people doing something legal and asking why they didn’t do something illegal instead…

    Reply
  14. alecm
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    Yeah, but I’m not angry. I’m just righteous. 😎

    Reply
  15. Chris Samuel
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    Uh oh, he’s got his smiting hat on again.. 🙂

    Reply
  16. Jander
    re: Copying an image without permission is legally dubious without permission though..

    I would have thought that, certainly under the US’s “derived work” concept that one way to have done it was to make a thumbnail copy of the image that they liked, and then make that a link over to Alec’s full page. That way they get to show the image that they like to their readers, but Alec would get the full credit direct from the page he wanted to serve that image from.

    Derived works are fun. Whilst doing the image compression stuff I went to a number of conferences where the concept of derived work was discussed. Back then, 1990’s, just shrinking an image down made it a derived work, and therefore copyright to the person that shrunk the image ! Imagine that. You could rip off images from anywhere, reduce them by one pixel in each direction and you owned that image. That’s why a lot of work was put into watermarking so the original image maker could prove that they got there first.

    Reply
  17. Chris Samuel
    re: Copying an image without permission is legally dubious without permission though..

    That’s an interesting point, not come across it before.

    No idea whether that’s applicable to other juristicions though..

    Reply
  18. lodestarr@hotmail.com
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    how was i brought to this image? well i went on google and was searching for images that popped out at me… i typed in life and this was one that came up. i would love to know whos’ amazing art this is and say thank you. it made me think.

    ashley

    Reply
  19. james
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    well I completly understand your concern. and you want credit for your photo which makes perfect sense. However if you’re seeking credit for your photo I advise you give credit to the graffiti artist who painted the wall. thanks.

    Reply
  20. bartb
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    Which part of “Picture of a graffito by Banksy, http http://www.banksy.co.uk/” did you fail to understand?

    Reply
  21. alecm
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    Forget it mate; there is a breed of human who leaps to the wrong conclusion and won’t be budged from it even in the face of textual evidence to the contrary staring them in the face.

    They’re the same kind who pepper my other popular article with requests for passwords to be cracked.

    I suspect that it is this subspecies who comprise the primary source of they who become middle-managers in later life.

    Reply
  22. Cryptocracy
    re: Other People’s Bandwidth – An Inexhaustible Resource?

    I searched google for “life” found your image and clicked on it. It brought me here. I’m not sure if that helps you at all but, that’s how I got here

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More posts