Dev sets up “goatse” trap for sites that steal his free web game
Thieving iFrame sites now say: "I steal other people’s code because I’m a total hack."
"If you are using an iFrame to display a site that isn't yours, even for legitimate purposes, you have no control over that content—it can change at any time," Simmons warns. "One day instead of looking into an iFrame, you might be looking at an entirely different kind of portal."
Holy shit this guy is amazing.
I get it though. People trying to monetize your work which was purposely hosted for free without ads would drive me mad too.
Holy shit this guy is amazing.
People have been occasionally replacing images at least as long as people have objected to other parties deep-linking to images on their site.
I remember there was a story where some newspaper was stealing an image to print in their paper. The guy noticed after the first edition went out and somehow figured out that they were hot linking to his image in the layout software, so he changed the code on his site so that that hot link would send a different image.
No one noticed and then they sent it to print so they accidentally published the newspaper with an offensive image.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Since its launch last year, Simmons says he has attracted a "steady group of daily active users" for Sqword, which involves placing letters sequentially in a 5×5 grid to make as many valid words as possible.
As of press time, we found at least a couple of aggregator sites that apparently haven't noticed their stolen word game has been replaced with one of the rudest images on the Internet.
Many other sites apparently have noticed the change and have simply shifted to embed the (equally stolen) Pokémon-themed Sqwordle on pages that were showing the shock image just days before.
Simmons uses this case as a cautionary tale, not just for game thieves but for any web developer that hosts external content on their site.
"If you are using an iFrame to display a site that isn't yours, even for legitimate purposes, you have no control over that content—it can change at any time," Simmons warns.
More than that, though, we think Simmons has opened up a completely new front in the never-ending war against plagiarists that look to profit off of the work of others.
The original article contains 384 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 52%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
A+ stock photo and caption from Ars here
I'd love to see the code as implemented for the iframe feature. Sounds like a good way to protect your intellectual property.
The only thing that comes to mind is to rugpull. So you move the game to another location in your site, and in the old URL you put the troll image. It may be an issue with people with bookmarks tho...
Use the Referer header to check what domain the browser is loading from. You can also check the connection origin IP to see if it’s a site you know to be scraping you (i.e. not hotlinking but caching). Could possibly also check the User-Agent header to detect scrapers, depending on if they bother to forge it or not.