[disc] leeching, deeplinking, traffic and a highscore board

[happinessSam]

Since lots of people tried to make analogys for deep linking, I thought I'd have a go.
It'd be like a commercial TV station took a load of short films, mostly from films student, but sometimes from pro's and other stations. They then aired them, making money from commercial breaks, gave no indication that these films belonged to or were created by anybody else but themselves, and to top it all off, this would cost the people they tooks these films from money.
That sounds about right to me.

[nGFX]

just to clarify this:

you would NOT mind that you have to pay for someone else making money with YOUR work? (i'm not talking about some 20bucks here, i talk about costs that do hurt (at least me))

i don't mind it as long as
- i do not make money with my work AND no one else is making money with it. (in that case i'm willing to pay for my work to be seen)

all other cases (esp. the ones that involve breaking through my "protection") i do mind.

--- end of line ---

[ant512]

Originally posted by nGFX
you would NOT mind that you have to pay for someone else making money with YOUR work? (i'm not talking about some 20bucks here, i talk about costs that do hurt (at least me))

Have a look at the logs for IK++:

http://ant.simianzombie.com/games/ik/viewlog.php

This only lists the last 6,000-odd hits, but you can see I've been hit by Pumbo nearly 1,500 times since I last flushed the log (which I do fairly regularly), and ABCJuegos just over 600 times. (The raw data for this is stored at http://ant.simianzombie.com/games/ik/logfile.dat)

The SWF is about 500K, so that's a gigabyte of bandwidth gone on one game. The other games on the site are also linked to by Pumbo and others, and most of the other hits in the log are from similar sites.

Do I mind that Pumbo is making money out of me? No, because I get extra traffic that, should I choose to do so, I can direct to other areas of my site. It's free advertising - people see the link on Pumbo, and post it on other sites; people email the link around; and suddenly I'm getting 20,000 hits a day whilst the link appears on people's sites.

I know the situation you are in; I had to migrate my site to a new server to cope with the traffic. I can also see your point - you want credit for your creations, and you're annoyed that they have deliberately sidestepped your protection system. However, I do feel that you've been handed the perfect opportunity to promote your site to thousands of visitors, and you're not exploiting it. Pumbo essentially make money by sending visitors to your website - they are promoting you! I doubt you'll find a dedicated marketing company who would do that job without charging you anything.

EDIT:

Oh, and about other people making money out of your own hard work: Did you say you were running Apache as your webserver? Have you ever looked at how much that program, developed by hundreds of coders since 1995, costs to download and use? And do you know what percentage of internet servers run it?

[luxregina]

Originally posted by ant512
(...) Did you say you were running Apache as your webserver? Have you ever looked at how much that program, developed by hundreds of coders since 1995, costs to download and use? And do you know what percentage of internet servers run it?

Well, that's also their choice to release it for free - Noone should be forced to do things for free though, and it's legitimate than nGFX expect some income from his hard work, if it's the business model he chose ...

[ant512]

Originally posted by luxregina
Well, that's also their choice to release it for free - Noone should be forced to do things for free though, and it's legitimate than nGFX expect some income from his hard work, if it's the business model he chose ...

I hope everyone here who runs Apache, and who doesn't like other people using their work without paying, has made a donation to the Apache Foundation...

http://www.apache.org/foundation/contributing.html

[nGFX]

Originally posted by ant512
Oh, and about other people making money out of your own hard work: Did you say you were running Apache as your webserver? Have you ever looked at how much that program, developed by hundreds of coders since 1995, costs to download and use? And do you know what percentage of internet servers run it? [/B]

nope, i use an iis - and i paid for it (and for the server as well).
as for the hits: dynaminer and splitted images produced some 150.000 hits in 5 days resulting in nearly 300gb traffic ...

i agree to what has been said about the exposure ... but i also would have liked that my wish (not to be linked without permission) would have been respected, too.

--- end of line ---

[T1ger]

Originally posted by ant512
Oh, and about other people making money out of your own hard work: Did you say you were running Apache as your webserver? Have you ever looked at how much that program, developed by hundreds of coders since 1995, costs to download and use? And do you know what percentage of internet servers run it?

That's a COMPLETE different thing!

[d3s_inc]

Wow, this is a good discussion. Well, I have been skimming over most of the posts, and I would love to give me opinion.

I must agree, in part with Ant about "deep-linking". If someone has a link to a certain page of you site that is fine. I do not see a problem in someone having a link to a particular page on a site because that is what the internet is all about. However, when "deep-links" to a content in, say an i-frame, where URL's and so forth are hidden and where someone could have this content surronded by ads, I do feel that to be wrong. That is basically someone making money by displaying someone elses work, without permission and with no credit.

Alright, so now there is a fine line between what is right and wrong. Clearly Google makes money by displaying other sites. The difference though lies in how they display the links. With Google you are linked to the site and you know you are on a new site. When people embed an .swf url in an i-frame people have no clue that it is actually part of someone else's site.

About APACHE, well, they allow people to use their software for free (under restrictions i would suppose). If I had a Flash Game on my site that I said, "download and host on your own site as much as you want" then I would have no problem with people doing exactly that. However, when people are using up your paid bandwidth, that is not really correct.

Finally, I would just like to say that the different methods to stop "deep-linking" and "leeching" discussed are great =). I personally think that changing .swf path names is the best way to go. There is not much someone can do if you keep changing names.

[pixelsumo]

You are never going to come to a conclusion on this as each person wants their content displayed in a different way. Some people don't mind deeplinking, some people don't mind games being taken from their own site and used, others do.

If someone was embedding my game on their pages (hotlinking) then it would be costing me money for bandwidth and theyd be making money through advertising revenue. If people could have my game for free I'd let them know and send them a swf to save bandwidth. If I wanted sites to pay for my games, I'd stop them hotlinking it in the first place. It's up to you at the end of the day.

If you want to stop it, just do it. Things you can do.

1) to stop people downloading the swf and uploading it to their own site, but a bit of actionscript in to stop them. see www.pixelsumo.com/storage/gameprotect/

2) to stop them embedding the file on your server in their page, you could use a htaccess, as described on the link above, but this might stop lots of people playing it on your site, because of firewalls etc. There is a nice javascript example of how to stop hotlinking (I'll dig it out)

3) to stop people loading your page in a popup/frame/iframe, hiding your content but just showing the game, use a bit of javascript on your page to breakout of frames.

4) easy but time consuming, rename the swf via ftp manually every day or so. most sites won't bother checking to see the new name of the file so it won't be included on the page. put in a swf of the old filename that opens your site.

5) use php to mask the file name in the embed on the page.

[d3s_inc]

I think you are absolutely right PixelSumo, and I do believe if you take some steps to protect your Flash work you can stop 99% of theft.

on question: how would you mask the file name with PHP?

[Squize]

As a game developer I really resent the time spent on producing protection methods.
I spent a whole day recently coming up with a system that screwed up asv. Now, didn't mind too much cause I've got to make a secure game for a client, so I'm getting paid to do that, but it's something I'd never do for myself.
I want to be writing games, not screwing around trying to protect my own games, on my own site.

Personally speaking, and I don't think I've got anything really constructive to add that already hasn't been said, I'd rather someone stole my swf completely than stole the bandwidth. A £372 bill for bandwidth due to leeching taught me that.
Yes, silly traffic is nice, and has brought clients to me, but I'd rather not be out of pocket to get that attention.

Squize.

[DominumBelli]

Just felt like adding my 2c

Originally posted by richardpendry


Admittedly you'll need to be ready for that extra traffic, but play them at their own game - instead of them leeching your bandwidth, leech their visitors.

Heck yeah, this, IMHO, is the way to go. If they want to leech off your bandwidth, turn it around and use it to your advantage.

The whole "Inside the .swf, use a url detection/redirection to generate traffic for yourself and your site" solution seems most attractive to me personally....I just like the idea of taking advantage of a ****ty situation and turning it to your advantage.
I'd do something like have a intro "Made by nGFX, master of the universe", then a splash of your own www.nGFX.com. If, at that point the .swf detects the file is on a different URL to www.nGFX.com open your www.nGFX.com/mygame.html page.

Check out http://www.flashkit.com/board/showth...hreadid=565460, just a little bit on gaming software piracy some might find of interest, and also somewhat relevent to this discussion.

Lastly, to all those bad people out there that make Squize spend time creating protection methods instead of spending time creating cames that make us come in our pants, you are EVIL!!!

[twitchymart]

Hey up.

Me and a friend were talking about this the other day, and came up with an idea that may be able to stop it that we might try (if anyone ever starts to try and leech from us).

However the only thing it assumes is that you can send a variable to flash through the embed tags, something I haven't checked yet.

Step 1: Whenever a page that can link to the game is opened, it inserts a record into a database that holds the time the page was opened and a unique identifier. This unique identifier is passed to the page with the movie on if the click is linked, then passed to the game (assuming this is possible through the embed tags).

Step 2: The game then checks this identifier in the database to see how long ago the game page was refreshed, if this was greater than say 5 minutes ago, instead of playing, it just displays a link to your site and requests you refresh the game page to get a new play id.

Net result: Anyone on your site can play, although they might need to refresh the game page, anyone who copies your embed tags to a different page will not be able to play, because the id will expire.

Disadvantage: Obviously if you can't pass a variable with the embed tags this will fail, also as the entire file would download you would still use up bandwidth, unless you can stop it loading.

Has anyone got any ideas, and think if this might work??

Martyn

[Squize]

You can pass args to Flash from html really easily, but ( and this is not meant to be as harsh as it's going to sound ) it's a bit of a sucky idea. Sorry.

I'm 10 points away from the highest score, and my five minutes run out and the page is refreshed. Not good. Plus you're going to be hitting your bandwidth yourself on your own site by re-loading it if not everything fits in the cache.

Squize.

[twitchymart]

Aye, could do with some refinment, I was thinking more that its only checked for the time limit when you first load up the game, so then if the five minutes is up you just have to go back to the launch page, get a new id and relaunch the game, not cutting out in mid-game, because once they have initially passed the check then I can't see much way of them continuing without being the same person.

[strille]

Ok, this is not a story about leeching or deeplinking, but rather a story about bandwidth:

We got an email from Nils from 2ice.net, who kindly hosts the demo of the game "The Curse of Sylvaniah" for free. He told us that at around 13:30 yesterday, the traffic increased about 100 times. In 5 hours the site got 300.000 hits and drained 4 GB of data!

All this because www.minijuegos.com placed a link to the game!

[nGFX]

this is what happend to DynaMiner, too ...

(but i was asked if a link could be placed)

the problem was that a short while after, a whole bunch of leecher sites linked to the game (mostly trying to bypass my window) and the traffic rocketed through the roof ...

<olli/>

[kendude]

Never thought I'd be part of one of these conversations...
I woke up this morning and found a game was ripped and put on a site without asking, and homeboy had the nerve to take out my link. I won't mention any names since I've sent an email requesting they remove it. Hopefully it gets resolved. I'm optimistic.

I also just went to the Spanish miniclip and saw my unfinished RABMO on the main page a few spaces below's Strille's.

I guess it is all just a matter of time before things of this nature occur. Unfortunately I do not know much of protection, servers and the languages necessary to protect my work, I want everyone to be able to play my games, just not the stealing or deeplinking with banners etc... making money off my work/bandwith while I'm not making dill.

It might be a good idea if a game meets a certain requirement for quality/gameplay, etc... for it to be branded with security badge developed by one of the nastier coders here? Like a creative commons license with protection built in? Maybe its a good idea? Maybe not? This has been mentioned before, i was thinking of aomething like what Stimunation does, they have their badge/intro in their work so it brands it, but then have a encryption/protection. I can't write my own, sure I could learn but I only have a few hours a day available for working on the actual games, protection would only be a distraction. I know I don't want to be a jack of all trades and a master of none. I'd rather leave somethings to people who are best at them. I'll go out on a limb and say that hackers for example are pretty good at what they do, but thats probably all they do. I'm a hobby level Flash Game Pseudo Developer and thats what I do, not security. Sorry about the ranting. Good day.

[Cherwine]

http://altlab.com/htaccess_tutorial.html

great article on stoping hotlinking and bandwidth theft. requires soem htaccess changes but it is worth it. I'm pretty sure it would work with .swf files not problem.

Also if you don't want someone to save a direct link to your page with your game on it in their favorites what you can due is do a session id check on every page. Everyday the session ID is set to some equivlant of the numbers that day is equal too..

like today would be 2440908040695 the leading 244 and falling 0695 are just numbers put in so the number doesn't look as much like a date 090804 is september 8 2004. That way the direct link to your page with the game is only good for one day after that it will fail. and you will redirect anythign that comes to that page with out the correct session id to your front page.

[kendude]

Whats worse than deeplinking & leeching?
Maybe its equally bad? THIEVES!!! To hell with reverse engineering! Yarr, I'm a bit fired up at the moment. I just sent out this letter:
XXXXXX,
Unfortunately your Games Team did not ask for my permission to use my game and have likewise made changes to the code that I find unpallatable. I request that you remove Crazy Closet from your site at your nearest convenience. In addition to this I strongly encourage you to review other content submitted by your Games Team and in the future to make sure you have full permission from the games' authors before posting their work. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Kenneth Walton
kendude.com

These mofos removed the link to my site, I may have let them keep the game if they hadn't rubbed so awfully wrong with sandpaper. I'll keep checking his site and hopefully the game will be off in a day or so. This internet is like a double-edged sword.

I have released this game to gotoAndPlay.it, PNFlashGames, IBPROArcade & SYNERGYForums to help/ test traffic and get some publicity. All of those guys seem pretty straight up and respectable. I hope no further action needs to be taken. Good day.