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Once, out of the kindness of my foolish heart, I ran a server with a lot of great sound effects for all and sundry to download. Eventually the bandwidth was ge
by nonrandomstring 3y ago
Once, out of the kindness of my foolish heart, I ran a server with a
lot of great sound effects for all and sundry to download.
Eventually the bandwidth was getting hammered by a huge number of
leechers seemingly from some apps that had simply hard-linked to the
resources.
After replacing said resources [0] they soon ceased but not without a
slew of abusive and entitled emails demanding I restore the SFX.
Oh fun times!
[0] https://fukpig.bandcamp.com/track/all-of-you-are-cunts-and-i-hope-you-fucking-die https://fukpig.bandcamp.com/track/all-of-you-are-cunts-and-i...
- VHRanger 3y agoYou're selflessly trying to get people to appreciate new music styles and get in touch with their anger and they respond with contempt. What an entitled bunch
- duxup 3y agoIn the days of P2P file sharing I used to share files with file names and metadata indicating they were rare Metallica live recordings of Metallica songs and other metal band's songs.... but instead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwK_WOXjfc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwK_WOXjfc0 So many downloads.
- ponector 3y ago[dead]
- ahartmetz 3y agoOh, hello Lars Ulrich!
- swores 3y agoHopefully you've since grown up a bit and discovered some hobbies that don't involve being a dick to annoy strangers?
- tormeh 3y ago> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwK_WOXjfc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwK_WOXjfc0 I'm downright shocked that this wasn't Rick Astley.
- tbossanova 3y agoWas expecting to be rickrolled!
- extraduder_ire 3y agoThis is part of how Soulja Boy became famous initially, by uploading his song "Crank That" with the metadata from various top-40 tracks of the time. Or so he says, it may have been mostly copycats after a time.
- dpedu 3y agoHah, back in the flash days I did a similar thing. I ran a website, one of those one-page deals where the whole point of the site was a single button that played a sound. I too had a problem with people hotlinking my flash app, so I used the same trick to redirect it to a different applet that played loud horrific screams!
- jjice 3y agoOh I love stories like this - great retort! It reminds me of that time that some app (or apps) was hammering an image of a butterfly from Wikimedia because it was part of some sample code that was never removed. I couldn't find the story but it was a fun but upsetting source of abuse from unknowing devs. Edit: It was a picture of a flower. I replied with some links.
- amatecha 3y agohahah yeah years ago when i ran my web server in my home, some images got hotlinked to on forums.. welp, some pretty simple redirects based on referrer probably resulted in some pretty confused forum-goers. :)
- tptacek 3y agoThe users of these apps probably don't even understand what it means to hotlink someone else's resources, and, rather than simply remove the resources, you replaced them with an overtly offensive message. I'm not saying you weren't within your rights to do that, but you can't at this point high-horse and complain about the abusive emails you got as a reaction.
- BHSPitMonkey 3y agoI was under the impression the emails came from the app developers. Surely it's reasonable to complain about their entitled demands, unconditionally?
- michaelmrose 3y agoI don't think its possible to create a website without understanding linking.
- admax88qqq 3y ago"I ran a server for free sound effects for all and when it got popular I fucked over my users" lolwut.
- adhoc_slime 3y agoYou know that is not in the spirit of the website. They were taken advantage of.
- worthless-trash 3y agoOld mate probably doesn't know, as a lot of people have been conditioned that if its online it's free.
- darig 3y ago[dead]
- karaterobot 3y agoThe issue was hotlinking directly to resources, which has been a no-no on the web since day one. The fault is entirely on the side of the bad actors who misused a free resource and in so doing ruined it.
- ngcazz 3y agoShould've cached the responses!
- nonrandomstring 3y agoWell that's not quite what happened is it? It was never "popular". I got my stuff abused and retaliated in a benign, schoolboy fashion for laughs. Though if shall own any blame it's for being naive and inexperienced in the days before we all needed rate limiting against corporate bots. As it goes, the whole shebang got archived on Wayback/Internet Archive so all the goodies remain up there for people to enjoy and I stopped needing to run a box and deal with misuse. God bless the Internet Archive I guess.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
- mrweasel 3y ago> simply hard-linked to the resources It's fairly surprising to see that approach from pretty large brands/companies. Some Indian ISPs are kinda notorious in that they'll just link to huge image files on third-party sites and just let their 300 million customers hammer the poor site into the ground. I guess it saves them bandwidth, but they also run a huge risk of pissing someone off and have that asset replaced by something nasty. When people use this kind of hard-linking/hot-linking of resource I don't think they do it to save money or to be evil, I think it mostly gross incompetence. We had an issue where our product images would just be ruthlessly scraped, if there had been some rate-limiting in place we'd most likely just have allowed it or not noticed. Normally I just pointed the poor scraper to a multi-gigabyte file or funny and unrelated image, if you want to download the same image of a beaver 25.000 times go ahead. But I also seen amateurishly search engines just pound a site to the point where it was easier to just deny all traffic coming from their crawler, as compared to try to reach out and figure something out. Say what you will about Google and Bing, their crawlers are well written and well behaved.
- ecshafer 3y agoThe isps can pretty easily set up a cache for things that are popular. There was a time when I worked for an ISP consultancy, where Netflix would literally give ISPs a prebuilt cache server iirc for free, and that was a win win for everyone. I shouldn’t be surprised that some shitty isp thinks it’s easier to hard link, but making a cache isn’t that hard.
- abdullahkhalids 3y agoA couple of years ago, the main submarine link connecting my country to the internet was damaged, and internet basically slowed to a crawl for a day. Could barely open anything. But Netflix was running at full HD with no problem. So they must have had local cache's with the ISPs.
- masukomi 3y agothis is how CDNs make their money. They replicate popular content close to the users. They generally do that WITHOUT giving anyone hardware, but by renting hardware in smaller areas, and setting up their own data centers in popular areas. source: I used to work at Akamai (it was a while ago). The myriad things they do with their edge servers is pretty amazing, but for simple CDN stuff, most of the time clients aren't shipping hardware to isps. That being said, if Netflix can convince an isp to pay its electricity and hardware maintenance costs for a popular isp's customers that's going to pay for itself very quickly. So, i can see why Netflix offers this. It's just not normal AFAIK.
- ngcazz 3y agoHey, this is a proper banger!
- Modified3019 3y agoTruly, thou has cast pearls before swine.
- Pxtl 3y agoHonestly, I know that it's far too late to change now, but I think the ability of a web-page to silently request resources from other domains has proven to be a complete misfeature overall. What's it given us? Tracking cookies, spy-pixels, cross-site-scripting-attacks, hard-link-bandwidth-stealing, SSL mixed-content warnings, etc. Yes, I know it's also given us CDNs and Single Sign-On, but there are ways to implement SSO as a more active action without that, and I'm not convinced that CDNs are worth the cost we paid.
- rtldg 3y agoI was browsing the source of Cookie Clicker and noticed that it blocks sounds from soundjay.com (which third-party mods used) for similar reasons.