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keesan
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Images on grex
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Nov 6 22:43 UTC 2001 |
Use this item to discuss whether grex should allow images at grex-based
websites, if so how to control size or number of them, and other issues
related to images stored in the grex computer.
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| 69 responses total. |
dunne
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response 1 of 69:
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Nov 6 23:04 UTC 2001 |
The grex policy on images is sensible. Pictures on personal homepages
are often a waste of bandwidth. Even a small jpg is 20 or 30 k --
imageine how many words would fit in that space! For those who
simply must show the world 100 scanned photos of them and their dog
(http://photo.net/~philg), there are many suitable free hosting
sites available; many ISPs make some webspace available as part of
the service package too.
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jep
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response 2 of 69:
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Nov 6 23:24 UTC 2001 |
As long as Grex is on the current system, it has very limited
resources. It is wise to be cautious in allocating those resources.
When there are hundreds of gigabytes of disk space, and a few T1 lines
for connectivity, that'll be the time to consider freeing up
availability of photo images. But I predict by then there won't be any
issue to be discussed.
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steve
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response 3 of 69:
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Nov 7 03:41 UTC 2001 |
The disk space problems isn't the real issue, its the bandwidth
problem that scares me. With disk quotas, we could pretty much
throttle disk usage back, but the bandwidth issue remains. Sadly,
I think that will remain for some time.
Something that might not be impossible however, would be for a
Grex "images box" to reside somewhere else on the net that has good
connectivity, and create ftp accounts for people there, such that
their graphical images could come from that machine, and not impact
Grex itself at all. If we made people ask for such accounts, and
had disk quotas there as well, we could probably deal with it, without
it becoming a huge staff headache.
The problem with this approach is that we'd need to find a place
with a pretty good network connection that would let us have a machine
there. Offhand, I don't know of such a place.
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gelinas
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response 4 of 69:
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Nov 7 05:14 UTC 2001 |
<PerverseMode>
Australia?
</PerverseMode>
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spooked
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response 5 of 69:
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Nov 7 08:32 UTC 2001 |
Nice place.
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scott
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response 6 of 69:
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Nov 7 13:08 UTC 2001 |
Maybe instead of actually hosting images we could come up with an easy system
for referencing images stored elsewhere.
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pfv
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response 7 of 69:
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Nov 7 13:40 UTC 2001 |
what's "difficult" in pointing outside grex, to public servers or your ISP,
to load an image?
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keesan
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response 8 of 69:
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Nov 7 14:49 UTC 2001 |
What's difficult is first, not everyone has an ISP (which is why they have
a home page on grex) and second, the free websites don't work with the sort
of basic software which is all you need to access grex. (I tried several
different FTP programs and four different DOS-based browsers to upload images
to geocities and none worked. I finally got Netscape 3 for Win31 to upload
but it crashes about 3 attempts out of 4). The only image I had posted at
my website was a 15K gif, which was not even inline - is this excessive
bandwidth? Would grex be able to implement a policy of allowing only a
certain number of K per www directory rather than ruling out a specific class
of files? Or alloting all users a certain number of K to store images in some
other directory on grex that could be accessed via a website? (Can you link
to files not in www?). Or accessed via backtalk for those who want to refer
to an image in a conference item?
What is the largest website hosted on grex right now? Mine is about
12-15 K without that image, plus another linked file about 12K. Is a 50K
limit on total web space reasonable? Or a limit on home page size plus a
limit on total K?
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keesan
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response 9 of 69:
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Nov 7 14:52 UTC 2001 |
I just checked - home page 17K, a linked zip file 16K and a few other smaller
linked files (to access instead of the zip file) and some backup files which
could be somewhere else. 50K limit would work fine for me.
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other
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response 10 of 69:
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Nov 7 14:54 UTC 2001 |
People with sufficiently obsolete software to be unable to do as you
describe are self-selecting.
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malymi
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response 11 of 69:
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Nov 7 15:38 UTC 2001 |
re #3: many web servers can be configured to throttle bandwidth,
e.g., for apache there is mod_throttle.
re #8: your system must be b0rked. i upload content to a geocities
site frequently using only an command line ftp client, including
the one that is supplied with ms windows nt.
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aruba
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response 12 of 69:
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Nov 7 16:21 UTC 2001 |
Re #10: Part of Grex's mission is to provide a service to people of limited
means (and therefore limited software).
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keesan
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response 13 of 69:
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Nov 7 16:22 UTC 2001 |
I do not use Windows. I tried various FTP programs and none worked. They
all work for uploading to grex. Perhaps geocities is set up to only work with
Windows programs?
My software is not obsolete. It is all fairly new except for the Netscape
- Nettamer, Arachne, Newdeal are all frequently updated. IT is designed to
be much smaller and faster than the Windows stuff. I use Kermit to upload
to grex. I have used Nettamer's FTP program and the Clarkson U FTP which came
with Arachne to download from grex. They work fine, but not with geocities.
Is there some reason that a 15K .gif consumes more bandwidth than a 15K text
file?
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keesan
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response 14 of 69:
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Nov 7 16:29 UTC 2001 |
Thanks Mark. We set a lot of people up with 486s or older and grex, for email
and web browsing. I know of three still using grex for email, two of whom
type with one finger and none of whom had ever used a computer before. All
over 60. I made web pages for two of them and would like to take their photo
with our new used digital camera and put it at their site. I could reduce
the image size to whatever was deemed an appropriate upper limit.
Is there some way to access images not in www, by linking to a website?
What about allowing each grexer one image file in a central directory, of some
maximum size? Can you write software to limit file size in one directory?
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remmers
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response 15 of 69:
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Nov 7 18:09 UTC 2001 |
Re #13, last paragraph: Probably because gif is a compressed
format.
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keesan
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response 16 of 69:
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Nov 7 18:58 UTC 2001 |
zip is also a compressed format - is grex going to rule out zip files?
I suppose I could then unzip my 16K file into something larger and post that.
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mdw
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response 17 of 69:
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Nov 7 21:22 UTC 2001 |
People use text differently than images -- so yes, a 15k text file *is*
different than a 15K gif.
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keesan
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response 18 of 69:
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Nov 7 22:18 UTC 2001 |
I just checked and a 9K HTML file zips to about 3K. Does it take as long to
download from a website in either form?
Marcus, what do you mean by 'use text differently'? I use my zip file to
convey text and it is compressed, like a gif file is.
Drew and Mark were also interested in being able to post images at grex, if
I understood right. Drew wanted to be able to refer to technical drawings.
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janc
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response 19 of 69:
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Nov 7 23:00 UTC 2001 |
Yes, images take more bandwidth. As Marcus says, they are used differently.
Creating a 16K text file requires some effort. The only hard thing about
creaing a 16K image is triming it down to that size. If we enable images
people will much more casually create large files on their web sites. The
average size of a web page will increase vastly.
The other issue is that if we enable images, then it won't take long before
75% of the images on Grex are porn. You offer a free place where you can
anonymously put images on the web and you get lots of porn. Aside from the
question of how we feel about being a porn supplier, the problem is that
someone gets on IRC, announces their free new porn site, and Grex is suddenly
hit with armies of people downloaning images from the web server. So now
Grex's internet connection is completely jammed with porn, and nothing else
can be accessed. Suboptimal.
If we enable only small images, it is possible that we won't attract much
porn. Porn consumers are fairly snobbish and little teeny images probably
won't be of much interest. Since they like to download and save their porn,
they probably won't be attracted by big images made by tiling small images
either. So I'd guess small images would work out all right. It'd take some
work to figure out what the cut off should be and how to set a size limit on
images.
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mdw
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response 20 of 69:
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Nov 7 23:35 UTC 2001 |
I'd hate to decide where the cut-off for size in porn sites is; there
are some *very* weird economics at work there.
A 9K html file probably *will* download faster than a 9k jpeg. The jpeg
is already compressed internally using a lossy algorithm; that means
there's very little entropy left for a lossless compression algorithm to
work with. The html file is in ascii, which means there's much less
entropy, and there is a lot of opportunity for compression.
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spooked
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response 21 of 69:
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Nov 7 23:58 UTC 2001 |
You don't even need a phone line... internet connectivity is sufficient,
and phone calls to the USA are so cheap here these days, that I could
definately afford an hour/month phone call to the USA.
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keesan
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response 22 of 69:
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Nov 8 02:16 UTC 2001 |
Would it be fair, in the interest of discouraging use of grex for porn, to
limit images only to paying members? I doubt people would pay to put a
couple of small images on grex.
Would 20K be a fair upper limit for an image? Is there some way to
police this? Is there some way to set an upper limit for the amount of disk
space taken up by web pages per user? If the upper limit is 50K, you cannot
put a lot of images in www. You might also ask users to use links instead
of inline images so that the images would not be automatically downloaded.
Re compression of html, as I said my sample html file compressed from over
9K to under 3K when zipped, so if images are to be banned, you might want to
ban all compressed files. Would the 9K uncompressed html take up more or less
bandwidth than the 3K zip file?
Jim thinks people would not bother coming to a grex homepage to see one 20K
pornographic image, or at least they would not come back again. He had posted
a jpeg of his daughter's son, about 22K, but could presumably learn to trim
it to 20K. Linked, not inline.
Can grex be programmed to not display any inline images at grex websites?
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cmcgee
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response 23 of 69:
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Nov 8 02:32 UTC 2001 |
I really don't think we should start giving paying members the right to
post images.
This does not solve our problem of keeping porn off Grex.
It also makes a difference between paying members and nonpaying users
that is unnecessary.
I agree that limiting outbound telnet to people we can track down is a
good reason to give that capability only to paying members. But being
able to track down someone does not give us the right to censor their
images. So then what is the point of making them produce ID and pay $60?
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steve
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response 24 of 69:
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Nov 8 05:05 UTC 2001 |
If we could get a remote grex image machine up, we could offer it to only
those who know to ask, with a stern statement about not having porn, because
of the unique problems it raises. We could automatically monitor the traffic
every day and figure out what the top users were, and either automatically
shut them down or send messages, etc.
This isn't a trivial task, setting all this up, so it would have to be
another Grex project, which I fear would take months. But before we did that,
we'd have to find a place willing to host the machine. I'm wouldn't be too
worried about physical access, since an OpenBSD machine would work great, and
if it was down for a day or three, so what.
I don't know of any such place where we could put the machine however,
and I really don't know how much data we'd be passing each day. If enough
people were interested in this and someone stepped forward willing to talk
with places about hosting, this could work. It's certainly in keeping with
Grex's goals, but has to be enough automated that it isn't a staff burden.
I think it could be done, but not really soon because I think finding such
a site willing to host an imagine machine would be hard.
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