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What happens when you rip off a site but forget to host the JS yourself
Some company in Argentina ripped off a friend of mine's site, but didn't even bother to host the JS themselves. So he did this. Original site is http://www.socketstudios.com/
- SpaceDragon 14y agoGood on them. A little backstory would be great though.
- SocketStudios 14y agoA little backstory: They stole my site (socketstudios.com) which showed up on my analytics as they for got to remove it. They also left the contolling javascript file on my server. I modified it to load images of dogs that have no idea what they are doing.
- dutchbrit 14y agoClassic way to "get them back" ;)
- VuongN 14y agoDid you try to contact them? (By them, I mean the site owner. I feel like this is a solo operation) On other notes, there's no stopping you from replacing the content of this area where you tell your own version of their description: (from site via Google Translate) "We have been working since 1999, incorporating technology and knowledge towards the design and communication, both institutional and business."
- CWIZO 14y agoI don't see why he should (if that is what you are implying), they didn't bother contacting him (apparently).
- yock 14y agoBecause that's how the law works?
- WalterSear 14y agoI don't see any lawyers involved.
- SocketStudios 14y agoWhere would the fun be in that?
- VuongN 14y agoYou're actually quite nice about it when you can actually do a lot more damages.
- cantbecool 14y agoWhat's an active URL for your personal photo site?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- SocketStudios 14y agoIt's not live yet.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- crikli 14y agoTangent: these kind of sites (the site that was stolen from), I'll call them "concept" sites, make me want to throatpunch a baby. If you are seeking to demonstrate your jQuery/HTML5/CSS3 skillz then do it in a way that has some applicable context. Don't break so far from established usage conventions that users have to invest their the majority of their focus figuring out the site at the expense of examining the content. After looking at several panels my understanding of what you do is still a guess. But I think you're a designer of some kind. If you are, the problem is that your site told me you care more about cool/flashy/pretty more than ease-of-use/user experience. As someone who engages designers on a weekly basis, that is not a positive differentiator.
- SocketStudios 14y agoThanks for that. It was a 'concept' site largely for my own amusement (and to teach myself a little bit of js). I do have a private portfolio site that shows more of my work and has no javascript in it at all.
- Loque_k 14y agoHmm, I kinda like it - and I tend to dislike sites that break conventions... its simple enough that it works really well for me.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jthayne 14y agoWould be nice though if contact information and info about the company was easier to get to. It is only available on the initial page or after scrolling through the entire portfolio (at least I couldn't find it anywhere else). At least if the site were designed to draw in business, that would be the case. It definitely is not obvious.
- mistercow 14y agoI like the aesthetic, but I found the navigation to be confusing. It gives the impression that you're simply navigating a 2D grid because there's no indication that the rows slide independently of each other (and reset after switching to another row). So it was pretty disorienting to get to the end of the top row, go down, and then not be able to go left. I know you just said it doesn't really matter, but I thought I'd offer something a little more constructive than "it's too flashy".
- Steuard 14y agoUsing Firefox 12 with NoScript installed, your site is entirely unviewable. Even in its most permissive mode (which works for the vast majority of sites), NoScript does block cross-site scripts that it considers dangerous. On your site, I get this in my Error Console: "[NoScript] Blocking cross-site Javascript served from http://flesler-plugins.googlecode.com/files/jquery.scrollTo-1.4.2-min.js http://flesler-plugins.googlecode.com/files/jquery.scrollTo-... with wrong type info application/empty, attachment; filename="jquery.scrollTo-1.4.2-min.js" and included by http://socketstudios.com/ http://socketstudios.com/ I suspect that fixing the error mentioned there would make your site usable to more people (and more secure). But can I put in a plug for web design via progressive enhancement, rather than web design that just gives a blank grey page with a border and a few non-functional buttons if the scripts fail to load?
- SocketStudios 14y agoSorry, forgive my ignorance (I'm a designer not really a developer) but are you saying I should host all my JS myself? As for the fall back to a working site should JS be disabled, or the scripts fail to load you're entirely right of course. There is a lot I could still do to the site, but it serves no real purpose and was largely just an experiment so isn't very high on my to-do list at the moment.
- eloisius 14y agoUsing a CDN is usually appropriate, but not hotlinking someone's site.
- rorrr 14y agoThat's not true. Linking to jQuery stuff on Google's CDN is widely accepted. If you're using Noscript, don't act surprised when modern javascript websites break for you.
- sedev 14y agoI'm using NoScript because JavaScript is * a privilege, not a right * a huge security vulnerability * a huge privacy vulnerability You gotta earn epsilon trust to get me to whitelist your site for JS. If your site is 100% broken with JS off? You haven't earned that trust; you've instead told me that you're sloppy. Double points if your site is something that could get its basic functions done with JS - I have seen blogs, sites whose job is present straight text, that completely break with JS off. What that tells me is that I should be deeply suspicious of the technical chops of the people responsible. It's not like it's hard to earn epsilon trust! Slap in a < noscript > element that says "here's what our site does, please turn on JS" is usually enough. "Please turn on JS" by itself, though, is not. You don't have to cater to people who have JS turned off - you just have to not give us the middle finger! When site designers let their sites break when JS is off, that tells me that they're not worth my time.
- junto 14y agoYou should minify that JS and CSS.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- bstar77 14y agoI would have used a more offensive image, but that's just me.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoThink of the children. Seriously. When I was younger I made a little social network thing for me and my schoolfriends. I didn't figure out how to properly deal with uploaded images (too much hassle), so I allowed you to simply hotlink a profile image. I hotlinked some funny picture at home, and... At school it was pornography from the site owner intended to stop people hotlinking. I very quickly changed the image.
- hswolff 14y agoHow does one forget to host their own JS?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- VuongN 14y agoCopy & Paste any codes without understanding really burn people. Wasn't there a startup that got into trouble for doing the same thing? They later tried to play it off as "A/B" testing. Maybe this guy is A/B testing on how fast he can destroy his reputation by doing Copy & Paste of another site.
- mryan 14y agoYes, Curebit got caught stealing/hotlinking assets from 37Signals. http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/28/curebit-apologizes-for-copying-37signals/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/28/curebit-apologizes-for-copy...
- pud 14y agoBack in the late 90's when Cnet was really big, they embedded a video -- which was hosted on my server -- into one of their articles. Without asking. I found out because my hosting company called me and said I was about to get a huge bill. Bandwidth was super expensive back then and there was no YouTube for free video hosting. I changed the file to a short clip of hardcore porn. I know it was mean. But it was funny and somewhat satisfying.
- m_st 14y agoYou should have introduced just a few frames of porn like they do in Fight Club :-) Anyway you made my day. Did Cnet pay the bill?
- genu1 14y agobahahahahaha!! Do you have any stats?; number of views before the link was taken off? Please tell me it was something stupid like a few hundred thousand views huge grin
- TomGullen 14y agoI assume you had the rights to the porn? :)
- calciphus 14y agoIt was the late 90s. Of course pud did.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- miketucker 14y agobeautiful site. pretty amazing you did it only 500 lines of js.
- SocketStudios 14y agohaha, i'm not sure if that is sarcasm or not. i'm a designer that dabbles in code and that was my first attempt at JS. it works but i'm sure it is probably a disaster.
- da_n 14y agoMade me wonder what would happen if some rogue Google engineer decided to replace the CDN hosted jQuery on thousands of sites with script to auto-play a rick-roll.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoI've always wondered what would happen if a rogue MS employee slipped carefully-hidden malware into Windows Update. They could cause havoc.
- leephillips 14y agoWouldn't that be redundant?
- RobertKohr 14y agoThank you for the chuckle.
- micahgoulart 14y agoWhat would be interesting is to detect the IP so that whenever the owners access the site, they see it normally, but others see it with the dog images. And put their email so visitors contact them telling them of the "vandalism", but when they access it, the site looks normal.
- JohnnyFlash 14y agoI was thinking exactly this! The problem with doing something like this is that the site owner will probably take it down within 24 hours. However... if the site owner cannot see it. Well well well.. could be up for days. Typically the first person to view the page will be the owner. They want to check everything looks alright. Would be interesting to see the results of something like this.
- VuongN 14y agoLet's see how long it takes before the offender finds out about this. I'm all for changing the company's description text to tell the full story as well. Maybe do it in Spanish(?) rather than English.
- SocketStudios 14y agoCan't do anything about the text. That's in the HTML which is on their server. I just have the JS file that controls the image loading.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoBut you can do stuff with the text! You can manipulate the DOM, yes? And your script displays it in the first place.
- burriko 14y agoIndeed. You can basically change the site to whatever you want. Changing the text in those boxes should be as simple as adding this to your javascript file. $('#details .body').html("This guy ripped off my site!")
- SocketStudios 14y agoRight enough. Too late now though.
- VuongN 14y agoYou have access to jquery AND your script loads in the head. I think $(document).ready(function () { $('[id*="details_"] .body').html('El propietario del sitio es robar el contenido literal de mi sitio: http://socketstudios.com http://socketstudios.com. Si usted hace negocios con esta persona, usted va a tener un mal momento.'); })
- gouranga 14y agoHa ha nice one. Justice served :)
- PezCuckow 14y agoServed this guy right!
- okamiueru 14y agoDid anyone take a screenshot of it?
- rainkinz 14y agoAnyone?
- drcongo 14y agoAnd it's gone. That cheered my day up hugely though, thanks.
- tschellenbach 14y agoWhat crap, just go to a company which does pay well. I'm a coder myself and my startup Fashiolista pays competitively. (Amsterdam though)
- Khao 14y agoAll I see is an "Index of /" page with a link to a folder called videoflow (now changed to 3333). Did the owners take it down? Does anybody have a screenshot they can share?
- lucian1900 14y agoYes. There used to be a page with a picture of a dog.
- theSuda 14y agoCan someone dig up the page from browser cache and put up a screenshot for those who missed it?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- theSuda 14y agoAll I see on the site now is Index of/ page with a folder named 3333. What did I miss? :(
- VuongN 14y agoI think he/she finally figured out what's going on!
- rplnt 14y agoAnd what happens when you steal images from cracked - http://www.cracked.com/blog/this-is-why-you-dont-steal-from-cracked/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/this-is-why-you-dont-steal-from-...
- benrmatthews 14y agoFrom the comments of that Cracked article: "We had a similar problem at work, but we figured out the IP of the person doing the direct linking and dished out the images they expected to that IP, but the rest of the world saw an ad for our site." One to consider for next time?
- 1SaltwaterC 14y agoOnce upon a time there was a dude that had the bright idea to hotlink the swf mediaplayer that I was hosting. Besides wasting my bandwidth, it also wasted my time for tracking all the referrals where he used the code. Long story short, he got a flash-based XSS in response. For the lulz.
- Khao 14y agoI remember I had a website once where I had a little clock widget that I made in flash. I discovered that some of the traffic to my website was coming from myspace and found out that someone had used my widget on their myspace page. I changed the code in my widget to detect which url it was loaded from and if it wasn't on my website, it would simply crash and back then, flash didn't have the 30 second timeout when a script becomes unresponsive, you really had to kill the browser to exit.
- talmand 14y agoI had a similar thing once. A company ripped off one of our landing page designs, even down to copyrighted material, and kept one of the little flash widgets in the footer. I showed the boss that I could take advantage of that by whiting out their page or replacing their content with whatever message we wanted.I wanted rather mean-spirited and rude messaging since it would appear to come from them. The way I remember it I was doing this by injecting javascript into the page from the SWF. The boss never let me do it, he decided to sic the lawyers on them instead.
- wazzupflow 14y agoBack in 2006 some guy ripped off my entire front-end for his ticket selling site in Europe and made the same mistake. I found out when going though my analytics. I blogged about it and actually made it to the front page of Digg (a big deal at the time): "How NOT To Steal A Design": http://digg.com/news/story/How_NOT_To_Steal_A_Design http://digg.com/news/story/How_NOT_To_Steal_A_Design Ah memories :)
- jakejake 14y agoI was on digg a lot back then and I remember that story!
- hellweaver666 14y agoI used to work for a hosting company and one of our customers (a magician of all things) copied our template into his webspace to build his own website - we spotted it and gave him a chance since he was a customer and all. We checked up on him a few months later and he had just done the same thing but to a different hosting provider (while still hosting with us). Why would a magician need a template that looked like a hosting company?
- SocketStudios 14y agoNow this guy says he has never seen my site and any similarities are coincidental. http://www.nerval.ch/ http://www.nerval.ch/ I don’t believe him but he wasn't stupid enough to leave any JS on my server so I can't do much about it.
- mnicole 14y agoAh, I love when you can tell from someone's portfolio that they didn't design their own website. Sorry this keeps happening to you, it's so silly all these copycats come out of the woodwork after your site(s) are profiled on siteinspire/et al, and act like it was a shear coincidence.
- simonbrown 14y agoReminds me of this: http://mike.newsvine.com/_news/2007/03/27/633799-hacking-john-mccain http://mike.newsvine.com/_news/2007/03/27/633799-hacking-joh...
- vivab0rg 14y agoFor what it's worth, here's all the data (JSON-formatted) about the domain, registrant, delegation, etc.: api.nicalert.com.ar/domains/dsignio.com.ar (shameless plug for my Nic.ar API)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]