Problems with the images? Please report here
We’re experimenting with a leeching blocker, and as a result you may see our regular images replaced by one that says “I am a bandwidth thief.” These images should only appear on the websites of leeches, not on 24oranges.nl itself. If you nevertheless see these images popping up, please report so here. Mention the web- or RSS-browser you are using, including version number, operating system, and how you are connected to the internet (proxy? firewall?).
Update: I’ve changed the RSS feed so that online feed readers no longer display images. Good or bad?
Leeches are web page authors who use other people’s bandwidth (that these other people pay for). To get all technological for a moment: a web author who wants to display an image on a web page, needs to first make that image available via a web server, and then put a reference to that image in the web page. When the web browser comes across the reference, it requests the image from the web server, which duly serves the picture. A leech doesn’t refer to images on their own server, but instead references images on other people’s servers, so that the browser is redirected there.
24 Oranges has always had only moderate troubles with leechers, but yesterday someone with a popular blog decided to leech all images of our recent Olympic feature (500 MB), and although even that didn’t cause much trouble (apart from the chagrin at such blatant copyright infringement), it spurred me on to tackle an item on my todo list, i.e. install a blocker. Unfortunately, leeching blockers are imperfect and it could happen that under some circumstances your internet set-up may confuse the web server into thinking you are not looking at 24 Oranges when you are trying to look at our pictures.
As mentioned via Skype, I saw the “Bandwidth Thief” images in Google Reader. I use Firefox on a Dell laptop (D630).
i saw the “bandwith thief” images earlier (on firefox in google reader), but the images are back to normal now.
i’ll miss the images in the feed though.
I’ll miss the images, it’s the first thing that attracts my eye when i’m going through 300+ newsitems in my google reader.
I’ve switched the images back on in the feed. We’re still looking for a solution that will let us stop leechers from leeching while causing as little nuisance as possible to our regular readers. At the moment this means that we’ve unblocked popular online feed readers such as Google Reader. Let us now if we’ve missed the application you’re using. Thanks for your help!
thanks !!