Protect links

[Martin Schneider]

Hi!

I want to maintain a large file link list (to legal files, by the way
:-)). The links should be protected from "grabbing", though.

Is it possible to make the browser download a link without making the
link itself public? Passing through the data is not an option due to
legal issues in Germany, not mentioning the traffic.

Thanks for your ideas and best regards,
Martin

[Martin Schneider]

Chris Morris schrieb:

Of course not: the browser has to be given a URL to download from, and
it may (probably will) provide a way for the user to get that
information.

I have been encountering downloads where I was unable to detect the
file's URL. The download window opened without any trace of the URL given.

Maybe it would be possible as well to detect the URL through a network
sniffer or something, all right...

Then I just have to do a captcha or something to prevent mass stealing
of the links.

Best regards,
Martin

[Harlan Messinger]

Martin Schneider wrote:

Hi!

I want to maintain a large file link list (to legal files, by the way
:-)). The links should be protected from "grabbing", though.

I don't understand what you mean by "grabbing".

>
Is it possible to make the browser download a link without making the
link itself public?

What do you mean by "download a link"?

If a link is on a page, then obviously it's visible to everybody who has
access to the page.

Passing through the data is not an option due to
legal issues in Germany, not mentioning the traffic.

What do you mean by "passing through"? If you don't want people to
download something from your website, don't provide a link to it, and
don't keep it on your website.

I'm sorry, but you seem to be working awfully hard at not explaining
what it is you're trying to accomplish!

[Martin Schneider]

Harlan Messinger schrieb:

Martin Schneider wrote:

>Hi!

I want to maintain a large file link list (to legal files, by the way
:-)). The links should be protected from "grabbing", though.

I don't understand what you mean by "grabbing".

Collecting all the links is a lot of work. I don't want other sites to
copy the idea *and* all the links I collected in hours of work.

I'm sorry, but you seem to be working awfully hard at not explaining
what it is you're trying to accomplish!

I want to provide links to, for example, rare drivers. I cannot host
them myself as I don't have the copyright holder's permission (yet). So
I want to link to them.

Later, if the project is accepted by the community, I may sell banners
or something.

Best regards,
Martin

[Martin Schneider]

Chris Morris schrieb:

>I have been encountering downloads where I was unable to detect the
file's URL. The download window opened without any trace of the URL
given.

Do you have any public examples of this behaviour?

Rapidshare links. You cannot download the files by directly accessing
the links displayed, so I assume they're fake and just triggering the
download mechanism from somewhere else.

so if you're worried about people going to the
extent of finding URLs via packet sniffing and similar it's not a
solution.

I see. So if there's no other way I'll just stick to the captcha
solution. This will not prevent people from stealing single links but
will make it impossible to steal them all automatically.

Best regards,
Martin

[Chris Morris]

Martin Schneider <ma**************@illusion-factory.dewrites:

Chris Morris schrieb:

I have been encountering downloads where I was unable to detect the
file's URL. The download window opened without any trace of the URL
given.

Do you have any public examples of this behaviour?

Rapidshare links. You cannot download the files by directly accessing
the links displayed, so I assume they're fake and just triggering the
download mechanism from somewhere else.

No idea, though I don't have any rapidshare links to hand to test
with. I suspect with Live HTTP Headers or similar you'd be able to
find out what was going on fairly easily.

so if you're worried about people going to the
extent of finding URLs via packet sniffing and similar it's not a
solution.

I see. So if there's no other way I'll just stick to the captcha
solution. This will not prevent people from stealing single links but
will make it impossible to steal them all automatically.

On the other hand, it gives them much more motivation to steal
them. If they're in an open list then people may link to the list as a
good place to find X, Y, Z, rather than copying the list (after all,
if the list is already freely available, what gain is there in copying
it). If the list is difficult to access - and any captcha that
couldn't be easily broken by a computer is going to fool real people a
fair amount of the time - then the motivation for people to set up a
competing and likely more successful open list is higher (whether this
open list is set up by directly copying from yours or not probably
doesn't matter, except perhaps for any copyright claim you might
pursue in the courts).

--
Chris

[Martin Schneider]

Chris Morris schrieb:

except perhaps for any copyright claim you might
pursue in the courts).

I neither have time nor money for litigation. That's why I am trying to
prevent stealing in the first place :-)

Best regards,
Martin

[GArlington]

On Jan 18, 1:57 pm, Martin Schneider <martin.schnei...@illusion-
factory.dewrote:

Chris Morris schrieb:

except perhaps for any copyright claim you might
pursue in the courts).

I neither have time nor money for litigation. That's why I am trying to
prevent stealing in the first place :-)

Best regards,
Martin

I am trying to understand what you are trying to do here...
You want to show links on your site linking to downloadable files on
some other site(s)?
If so, then I think you can set server side re-directs...

[Martin Schneider]

GArlington schrieb:

On Jan 18, 1:57 pm, Martin Schneider <martin.schnei...@illusion-
factory.dewrote:

>Chris Morris schrieb:

>>except perhaps for any copyright claim you might
pursue in the courts).

I neither have time nor money for litigation. That's why I am trying to
prevent stealing in the first place :-)

Best regards,
Martin

I am trying to understand what you are trying to do here...
You want to show links on your site linking to downloadable files on
some other site(s)?

Exactly.

If so, then I think you can set server side re-directs...

I'll look that up. Thanks for the idea.

Best regards,
Martin

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit Martin Schneider:

Collecting all the links is a lot of work. I don't want other sites to
copy the idea *and* all the links I collected in hours of work.

You have now wasted a total of several hours of people's time spent in
reading this thread and trying to understand what you are trying to do
and even helping you there.

In a word, the idea is absurd. Make your living some other way.

Surely you cannot expect HTML markup to be of any help here, so you
posted to a wrong group, to begin with.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[David E. Ross]

On 1/18/2008 4:17 AM, Martin Schneider wrote [in part]:

I want to provide links to, for example, rare drivers. I cannot host
them myself as I don't have the copyright holder's permission (yet). So
I want to link to them.

Later, if the project is accepted by the community, I may sell banners
or something.

Actually, rehosting someone else's Web content -- even with permission
from the owner -- is often a poor idea.

Content is often updated. If you rehost, then you must update the
content yourself, which requires monitoring the originals.

If you merely link to the other Web pages, you automatically provide the
updates when the links are visited. Then, the only updates you must do
involves ensuring that the links are still valid. If the links are no
longer valid, it's quite possible that the content itself was
problematical.

--
David Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>

Have you been using Netscape and now feel abandoned by AOL?
Then use SeaMonkey. Go to <http://www.seamonkey-project.org/>.

[Martin Schneider]

Jukka K. Korpela schrieb:

You have now wasted a total of several hours of people's time spent in
reading this thread and trying to understand what you are trying to do
and even helping you there.

In a word, the idea is absurd. Make your living some other way.

I asked for a technical advice, not for your consent to my business
model. So if you don't want to give any, that's perfectly fine.

Best regards,
Martin

[Darin McGrew]

Jukka K. Korpela schrieb:

>In a word, the idea is absurd. Make your living some other way.

Martin Schneider <ma**************@illusion-factory.dewrote:

I asked for a technical advice, not for your consent to my business
model. So if you don't want to give any, that's perfectly fine.

That looks like very sound technical advice to me.

See also http://www.htmlhelp.com/faq/html/publish.html#hide-url
--
Darin McGrew, mc****@stanfordalumni.org, http://www.rahul.net/mcgrew/
Web Design Group, da***@htmlhelp.com, http://www.HTMLHelp.com/

"I've cut this board three times, and it's still too short!"

[Steve Swift]

Martin Schneider wrote:

Is it possible to make the browser download a link without making the
link itself public?

No, but you can hide your links from simple observation by using
something like:

<A HREF=http://www.playboy.com onClick="location.href='actual
location';return false">You cannot see where this goes</A>

Most browsers won't display where that link will actually take you. You
have to put something in place of 'actual location', of course.

You can even encode the 'actual location' so that the browser ends up at
the right place but casual observation of the HTML source won't tell you
much.

Of course, people without JavaScript enabled will end up at Playboy
instead of where you wanted them to go. Or on our Intranet you end up in
"Intranet Jail" because the DNS server blows the whistle on anyone
foolish enough to attempt to get to one of the "naughty sites".

--
Steve Swift
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html
http://www.ringers.org.uk

[Stan Brown]

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 07:19:01 +0000 from Steve Swift
<St***********@gmail.com>:

No, but you can hide your links from simple observation by using
something like:

<A HREF=http://www.playboy.com onClick="location.href='actual
location';return false">You cannot see where this goes</A>

Most browsers won't display where that link will actually take you.

And many won't be able to use that link.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/200..._wont_help_you

[Steve Swift]

Stan Brown wrote:

And many won't be able to use that link.

Many? I think it will affect only people with JavaScript disabled, and
whilst the numbers might be quite large in absolute terms, as a
percentage this is minuscule (at least on the pages where I bothered to
record statistics). Whilst I understand the motive for disabling
Javascript, you can't get far without encountering problems these days,
if you do.

I would guess that fewer than 1% of the people who use browsers even
know how to disable JavaScript. And I'm basing my estimates on my usual
target audience - a very large technical/commercial company, whose
employees should be significantly more savvy than the average.

I've heard of tribes whose counting systems have only three numbers:
one, two, many :-)

--
Steve Swift
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html
http://www.ringers.org.uk

[Steve Swift]

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

Quite a wild guesser you are, aren't you?

Indeed so, but in 15 or so years of running a webserver with a target
audience of a few hundred thousand users, I've never had one mention of
things that didn't work with JavaScript disabled, despite there being
places (admittedly few) where this was the case. It's called experience.

I would bet that you expect the sun to come up tomorrow based on a
comparable level of experience.

So what did you intend to achieve by creating a JavaScript-only page or
a JavaScript-only pseudo-link, for example?

I gave the OP the closest answer to the stated request. My solution hid
the URL's from more potential users than any of the other posts. I'm
rather pleased with my efforts and am at peace. I hope you are too, but
I worry that you may not be.

--
Steve Swift
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html
http://www.ringers.org.uk