Fuddruckers Called Out on Hotlinking 668
naught writes "Fuddruckers, a hamburger chain, hotlinked to a flash game developer's Burgertime clone on their 'Fuddrockers' page. When the developer noticed an abnormal amount of traffic coming from their website, he decided to let the company know how he felt -- and maybe teach them about hotlinking.." From the post: "So, I redirected everything coming from Fuddruckers.com. (learned all about .htaccess files also... neat!) Wrote a nice little message pointing out how incredibly stupid their web developer is. And then redirected the main page to a pleasant little website showing photographs of slaughterhouses. And also opened up some more popups, for those that don't have popup blockers."
Is this still up? Lol :-) (Score:2, Informative)
If someone steals what I am saying, and puts it on their own site, then sues me when i change what I say, screw them!
Good for him!
Poo: fuddruckers.com is down. Oh, slashdot?
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Re:Steal the bandwidth, or steal the work? (Score:2, Informative)
www.fuddrruckers.com (Score:4, Informative)
Hotlinking != Hyperlinking (Score:5, Informative)
Hotlinking is the practice of taking someone else's resources, typically images, sounds, flash files, etc, and displaying them inline in your own HTML page. This causes losses to the creator because they still have to pay for the bandwidth of serving the file, but reap no benefits. For example, the creator may have advertising around the page with the Flash game that never gets seen.
Hotlinking is generally seen as very bad form among web developers.
Re:please educate me, Oh Mighty /. : why is this b (Score:5, Informative)
The Fuddrucker's site doesn't give the URL and email, that's only showing up in the game itself. Fudd's doesn't credit the author in any way on their own site.
Furthermore, as several have already noted, this type of link also constitutes bandwith theft.
Wouldn't a small-time flash developer want this sort of exposure?
No. I can say that with utmost confidence, being one myself.
Doing some sort of goatse move to poor kids who are expecting to play a game is just wrong. This guy should be taken to court or something for indecent exposure.
RTFA. He didn't put up anything obscene, he put up images from a slaughterhouse. And even if he had put up something obscene, the idea of taking him to court would be ridiculous. He's free to put whatever content he likes on his own site (provided the content itself is legal), and he's not obligated to preserve anything that someone else links to.
Re:please educate me, Oh Mighty /. : why is this b (Score:1, Informative)
Fuddruckers should be taken to court or 'soemthing' for theft.
Depending on stuff you don't control (Score:3, Informative)
I regularly get people including my photos ( http://www.dedasys.com/photos/ [dedasys.com] ) inline without so much as a thanks or credit. If they ask, I almost always say "sure, go ahead!". I don't use nasty pictures, but do redirect the abusers to a "thanks for your interest in my pictures, they are online at
Re:Ass (Score:1, Informative)
In addition to that, he didn't even bother to contact Fuddruckers to work with them to correct the problem. Most people are actually reasonable if you give them a chance. There could be many explanations beyond just corporate greed and malice. It could boil down to some incompetent employee who needs to be made aware of netiquette. If they value the game, he probably could have negotiated some reasonable terms for them to continue to use it and made a good chunk of money. As it is, by pissing them off and damaging their corporate image, I doubt they'll want to deal with him; they'll just replace it with another one of a zillion alternatives.
In other words, he actually had a good opportunity as well as negotiating points in his favor, and he blew it.
Best burgers (Score:1, Informative)
Of course, I had to leave the country, or I would have exploded.
Re:www.fuddrruckers.com (Score:3, Informative)
>
> These are the dangers of having an outreach program in your IT dept... webmaster on crack rocks.
This is probably a hack on their site
www.fuddruckers.com now points to google.com (Score:5, Informative)
Parent is bogus: Mod Down (Score:1, Informative)
Most of his claims are unsubstantiated:
1)The developer got free advertising: This statement is true in a minimal way. Not like going to http://games.briggster.com/ [briggster.com] though
2) An insignificant amount of bandwith used: This statement is unsubstantiated: There is no mention of actual bandwith use; just that Fuddruckers was creating ~10% of traffic.
3) The developer chose to do something malicious: True, but funny. Although the developer may be vegan - and thinking that Fuddruckers is incredibly malicious. (I doubt it)
4) The developer takes others content and does not give credit & is hypoticritical): This is malicious and unsubstantiated claim. It needs examples to be made, and it should get the author modded down. I went to http://games.briggster.com/ [briggster.com] and there is no evidence that he has stolen any code. In fact it's a crappy page with some games on it.
I am suspecting that this is the webdeveloper who just got canned from Fuddruckers - although his boss told him to do it.
Re:The word has been redefined (Score:2, Informative)
No. It's the diffrence between me providing a link to your post [slashdot.org] where you are properly credited for your creation, and it's presented in the way YOU intended, vs me presenting a portion of your post in such a way that it looks like I created it, while YOU still get to pay the price of MY use of part of your post taken out of content.
Bad on Fudruckers. They stole the resources of some guy to further their goals.
This guy on the other hand is furthering the goals of the meat-is-murder webhost by presenting their site as it was intended to be viewed, to the customers of a meat centric business. It's like free advertizing. [slashdot.org]
Now Fuddruckers has stolen Google!!! (Score:3, Informative)
[let history show that the above link is redirecting all traffic to www.google.com in an attempt to live through the
Re:Obviously he wasn't a Slashdotter... (Score:3, Informative)
So I replaced the icon with one that scrolled "$COMPANY_NAME, croporate welfare bum since 1881". A year later, they haven't still replaced the hot-link...
Elsewhere, whenever dopes on totally unrelated subject blogs link to my photographs (when it's related it's okay), I replace them with very explicit pictures of men having sex together. Often, the links disappear quick, but some don't...
(I actually had a story here on Slashdot [slashdot.org], back in February, about this).
Game Over... *beoeoeoeoeo... wut-wut* (Score:3, Informative)
You asked (Score:3, Informative)
The court ruled that framing was copyright infringement.
Re:Steal the bandwidth, or steal the work? (Score:4, Informative)
" A misspelling of 'referrer' which somehow made it into the HTTP standard. A given web page's referer (sic) is the URL of whatever web page contains the link that the user followed to the current page. Most browsers pass this information as part of a request."
Re:Steal the bandwidth, or steal the work? (Score:3, Informative)
2. If your definition of "culturally ignorant" is "doesn't know how many 'r's are in a single word" then I'm hardly hurt by your calling me that. Especially considering I myself am an Australian citizen, not a "Yank".
3. A Google search of "pages from the UK" for "referrer" yields 2.5 million results [google.co.uk] while "referer" yields 226,000 [google.co.uk].
4. And finally and perhaps most conclusively, the Oxford Dictionary Online returns no results for "referer", but a definition for "referrer" - and that's in the UK view!
See for yourself:
http://www.askoxford.com/results/?view=searchresu
http://www.askoxford.com/results/?view=searchresu
In short, fuck you.