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Grex > Agorage > #6: Member initative: Allow members to host images | |
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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 183 responses total. |
mcnally
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response 42 of 183:
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Sep 12 17:24 UTC 2006 |
Here's another reason why I don't think image hosting is a good idea
for Grex: common carrier status.
Right now, at least according to my limited understanding of the hazy
world of computer and internet law, Cyberspace Communications is not
legally responsible for things that are posted on Grex because we
exercise no content-specific editorial discretion (i.e. permitting some
things, forbidding others.) As an open system where people can post
what they want (subject to whatever *content-neutral* rules we impose)
we are afforded a certain measure of protection under the law as a
"common carrier."
If we start changing the rules from "no images" to "no offensive images"
we lose (or at the very least jeopardize) that common carrier protection.
It would be better, therefore, if the image policy is changed to allow
people to host whatever images they want (subject, again, to whatever
*content-neutral* rules we impose regarding size, total download bandwidth,
etc..) And in the end I think that a policy like that is going to wind
up attracting a bunch of people who will use a lot of our bandwidth to
serve stuff that I personally would find creepy. Consequently I'm not
very fond of the idea and would rather not get into that sort of
service to start with. But if people are determined that we should do
it, we should do it in as open a manner as possible and one that protects
the Grex organization according to our best understanding of the law.
The legal aspects, in fact, might be important enough that it'd be worth
paying a lawyer to provide a professional opinion on the matter.
Anyway, that's my two cents..
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steve
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response 43 of 183:
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Sep 12 17:27 UTC 2006 |
Yeah, I think thats right.
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glenda
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response 44 of 183:
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Sep 13 10:01 UTC 2006 |
There are so many other places where people can post images for free that I
see no real need to add them here. People have images that they want seen,
post them on one of the multitudes of free image sites out there and post a
link here if they like. We don't need the headache or possible legal
nightmare.
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cross
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response 45 of 183:
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Sep 13 21:27 UTC 2006 |
There's no NEED, but people WANT it. Why not? Other sites do it without the
amount of worrying that grex does, and don't seem to have big problems.
As for how to monitor usage, just write a script that looks at the logs; there
are plenty of them out there already, even. I'm sure the apache config file
can be configured to limit the size of image files.
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steve
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response 46 of 183:
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Sep 13 23:47 UTC 2006 |
The problem isn't just with Apache, its the problem that once
people hear of Grex allowing graphical images, they will be
shoveling file in, thinking its OK.
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cross
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response 47 of 183:
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Sep 14 01:08 UTC 2006 |
You think so? That hasn't appeared to happen to other sites, necessarily.
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steve
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response 48 of 183:
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Sep 14 03:35 UTC 2006 |
Dan, people already use Grex to a) share graphic files, b) get graphica
file and ship them home, c) put web sites up that use them (it doesn't
work but still costs us the bandwidth to get them here). I see this
every day. So yes, I believe what I said.
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naftee
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response 49 of 183:
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Sep 14 04:28 UTC 2006 |
re 45 You'd have to get valerie back if you want any scripts written around
here.
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cross
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response 50 of 183:
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Sep 14 11:40 UTC 2006 |
What percentage of users does that represent, and how many GB/month of
bandwidth would they use?
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steve
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response 51 of 183:
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Sep 14 16:49 UTC 2006 |
Since we try to stomp on people when they're caught doing that,
probably not too much. But in the last two months I've found two
repositories of jpgs that were renamed in an attempt to hide them,
each 200M+ in size. I find people who wget data and them FTP it
from Grex quite frequently. I know that there are people who
continue to use Grex as a waystation, and if they thought it
was OK to do it, things would ramp up. From conversations with
some reluctant folks caught doing this, I got statements that
getting pictures from Grex masked the site that they were getting
them from, trying to get around rules about not visiting porn
sites from company/university sites. For a while I thought the
practice was getting bettter (lesser) but I think its ramping
back up.
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cross
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response 52 of 183:
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Sep 14 17:28 UTC 2006 |
Perhaps. But then, with the small-ish disk quotas most users have, I'm not
sure they could upload much porn. I'm astonished that you found someone with
200MB of data, and I wonder how that happened....
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steve
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response 53 of 183:
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Sep 14 20:24 UTC 2006 |
It was on several accounts if I remember.
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cross
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response 54 of 183:
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Sep 14 21:31 UTC 2006 |
Someone is clearly motivated.
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scholar
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response 55 of 183:
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Sep 15 06:21 UTC 2006 |
Does Steve' have any proof of his allegations?
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steve
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response 56 of 183:
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Sep 15 11:40 UTC 2006 |
It's what we've been dealing with since we were on the net.
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steve
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response 57 of 183:
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Sep 15 11:49 UTC 2006 |
Using locate to find jpg, JPG, gif, GIF, png, PNG, pdf and PDF files
of those extensions, there are just under 10,000 of them. Note that
this does not include tar and zip files holding them.
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cross
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response 58 of 183:
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Sep 15 14:19 UTC 2006 |
Any idea how many gigabytes per month we would use if we allowed images?
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steve
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response 59 of 183:
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Sep 15 16:01 UTC 2006 |
Nope, and thats what I'm afraid of, a huge ramping up over a coulple
of months.
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cross
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response 60 of 183:
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Sep 15 17:50 UTC 2006 |
Other systems that allow personal web pages with images don't seem to have
this problem. What does mnet do?
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tod
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response 61 of 183:
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Sep 15 18:08 UTC 2006 |
M-Net allows images. It doesn't seem to be an issue.
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cross
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response 62 of 183:
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Sep 15 18:35 UTC 2006 |
Todd, as far as your are aware, are there any restrictions on size, etc?
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tod
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response 63 of 183:
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Sep 15 19:01 UTC 2006 |
I couldn't answer to that but I can say that I've not had any problems with
any images in my webpages there.
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steve
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response 64 of 183:
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Sep 15 19:43 UTC 2006 |
What does it matter what happens on other systems? We aren't talking
about other systems, we're talking about Grex. I *know* from personal
experience that a lot of people, an amazing number of people forn whatever
reason use Grex to get graphical files and then ship them elsewhere,
either by ftp or mail. I sent so many mails out at one point when I
was watching every day that I had a little scorecard where I counted
how many I was doing a day. I think the record was around 20 people in
a day.
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cross
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response 65 of 183:
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Sep 15 19:45 UTC 2006 |
You make it sound is if images are inherently bad. Yeah, you *know* that lots
of people try to put them on grex. I'm asking (a) whether that is bad, and
(b) if it is, why?
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steve
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response 66 of 183:
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Sep 15 19:54 UTC 2006 |
Sadly, a huge amount of the images I've seen people passing through
Grex are porn. Now, I don't have an objection to that itself--I say let
people do what they want. But when they use Grex resources in the
process of doing this, thats a problem. We have FAR more CPU and net
bandwith than we did before, but also fewer places on the net exist to
allow people to cover their tracks. I've had several people admit to
me that they were using Grex so as to not make an obvious impression
in FTP logs at their site just what was going on. On the heels of this
debate are other forms of audio/visual stuff like mp3's, mpgeg's and
PDFs.
Image files have the special problem of being a political item when
it comes to some kinds of porn, ala child pictures. We've had a few
cases of this that I know of, and hope we don't have more.
Looking from higher above this gets into what we want Grex to be.
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