TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

AT&T Protest Graphic for your blog, website, whatever

AT&T is stumbling through the Internet age with a stunning lack of foresight: in support of their TV offering, and to make friends with Hollywood, they’ve agreed to work towards actively scanning all AT&T network traffic for copywritten material.

I’m not going to go into the details. CenterNetworks, Uneasy Silence, Dave Winer, Techcrunch, Ars Technica, AllThingsDigital, and others have covered it exhaustively already.

I will, however, contribute a protest button/graphic/badge. Right-click & Save As, and deploy on your blog/website/tshirt/etc as you see fit. Link it back to whatever post, petition, goatse picture, or whatever you choose. Please don’t hotlink. Its a friendly png of 14kb in size, with a popular pop-culture reference to make it extra topical.

UPDATE: I took it down until I can figure out if the AT&T corporate logo can be used for critical purposes under the “fair use” clause without first seeking permission. I am a legal chicken-shit, yes.

UPDATE 2: What do you say - would it be covered under nominative use?

UPDATE 3: Removed literal trademark elements while retaining visual cues and tagline syntax. Should be legal, IMHO.

at&t, att, business models, censorship, copyright, copywrite, mpaa, protest, RIAA, security techmeme

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My Integer: 6E D0 CA 2D 9E 4F 80 4E 1F 1A 5F B9 3F 50 55 3F

I am the proud owner of a hexidecimal string: 6E D0 CA 2D 9E 4F 80 4E 1F 1A 5F B9 3F 50 55 3F. This string can be used to decrypt a copyrighted haiku, meaning that if you republish my integer anywhere, or link to anyone republishing it, I will post a cease-and-decist letter in your comments. Thanks to Ed Felten at Freedom to Tinker for hooking me up!

circumvention, copyright, css, decss, digg, encryption hddvd

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ImgRed.com - Fast, Easy, & Polite Image Hotlinking

If you’re FARKer, then you’ll regularly encounter “no hotlinking” or “bandwidth exceeded” graphics, from people that have posted images hotlinked from other sites, or hosted by weak services. Booo. ImgRed.com offers an alternative in the style of DuggMirror - pre-pend your image link with “http://imgred.com/” and ImgRed will grab, cache, thumbnail, and serve the picture for you.

Here’s an example of my favorite graphic from ValleyWag:

And here’s the code I used to do it:

<a href="http://imgred.com/http://valleywag.com/assets/resources/ASE4.jpg"><img src="http://imgred.com/tn/http://valleywag.com/assets/resources/ASE4.jpg"></a>

Simple, fast, effective. A great time saver for me (no saving, photoshopping, ftp’ing, etc.), and I’m not slamming ValleyWag with the no-doubt massive traffic that TechFold generates.

So - here’s the question:

What’s in it for ImgRed? I’m guessing that any attempt to monetize cached images by watermarking ads or whatnot will get into C&D territory very rapidly. Nor does ImgRed have any fundamentally serious IP that they can license or sell - the PHP GD library makes building such functionality trivial, and even creating a robust hosting system could be streamlined with Amazon S3.

So — perhaps ImgRed is just a useful, free service from a frustrated person. That’s cool, but if it catches on, its going to get expensive for them quickly. In the meantime, thanks!

EDIT: What’s the legality of caching anyway? Google does it for searching, therefore can ImgRed do it for sharing?

EDIT 2: Here’s a thought: ImgRed could index the pages on which they serve pictures, and use that data as metadata surrounding the image in question to create a great image search tool.

copyright, hosting, hotlinking, imagered, images sharing imgred

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