hpcfactor.com vs. Casio America Inc

As you may have noticed, we have a new Download Centre. This was designed to clean up much of the rampant binary hot linking which has been plaguing us for the last 6 years and using an excessive amount of bandwidth in the process. Such hot linking costs us financially, doesn't benefit the site at all as the people clicking through never even see a page on hpcfactor.com and generally slows down the site for legitimate users while ensuring that the blog, home page or support forum providing the hot link gets the karma and doesn't have to be financially liable for the expense.

As part of the introduction of the download centre, we have been breaking hotlink sources. As a consequence of doing this, some of the millions of hits that we receive every month that disappear into the ether of log file analysis are showing up more clearly as hard faults in web traffic.

This morning I noticed something somewhat unexpected in the faults list.

Casio America Inc are now appearing quite clearly in the error logs, attempting to access Microsoft ActiveSync 3.8's installer executable - directly off of our file server.

A little investigation revealed:
http://www.casio.com/support/techsupport/8D407E12-6CD6-4E93-BBD0-4A3C129B4080

As you can see, it is quite clear that they are directly hot linking the msasync.exe from us. Screen shot provided below in the event that the page is changed.

Clearly we do not find this practice either fair or acceptable. I am evidencing it with the community to prompt Casio to resolve this quickly.

• I have insisted that they cease and desist any and all hot linking to us


• I have given them permission to link to the download centre page for the download


• I have requested that they revise their support article(s) to provide links to http://www.hpcfactor.com/

I believe that these requests are more than fair, and have pointed out to Casio in my correspondence that I do not believe that it is acceptable for a multi-national corporation to be providing customer service while effectively having someone else involuntarily pay for that service.





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casio-page.jpg (130KB - 0 downloads)

Let's see if I understand this correctly...if I go to the Casio website and click on their world.casio.com link, I see they host massive websites in over 20 countries worldwide...and they want to link to you rather than just add it to one of their own websites?

Pitiful.....

Yup pretty much... makes you wonder why we served nearly half a million downloads of AS 3.8 last year doesn't it...

"Although this is no longer available from Microsoft's Web site, you can download ActiveSync 3.8 by going to the following page on HPC Factor (an independent third party website):"

I suppose it's possible this was an oversight and they thought they were linking to a download page, rather than hot linking the file. (Although when the link ends in .EXE, you think someone would realize...)

But in any case, you'd think even just a "Hey, can we link to your site" message would be in order before adding a link like this.

C:Amie, just rename the file a bit, what can be easier.
Those who want AS from here will search for it, not a big deal.

I doubt it's an oversight - it's pretty clear from the link address on that page that it's a direct link to the file. (Since when does a Web page have the suffix ".exe"? )

We have absolute gigabytes of binary content on our servers, would you propose that as a solution for every file on the system?

Changing file names also inhibits users from searching for the original file name on say google and stumbling accross something that they need.

The new download centre broke all hotlinks because all binary files were moved, and you'll have to be pretty desparate to spend the time breaking that apart to get a direct download url - you would have to be a pretty sad individual in my opinion if you would spend the time to paste a directly link instead of posting to the page.

But for anyone who is that sorry an individual, be aware that the entire download centre is automatic and I have a nice blue button that will move the binary on cue to a completely randomised new location should I catch anyone in the act
So really people, don't be wasting your time, just link to the page content, please!

What you should do is find the nastiest disgusting site in the world you can find and then whenever anyone links who shouldn't, redirect the link to that site...just imagine the complaints they get then!

I've done similar before.

I've had a few punks in the past who thought that they would use a live .bmp from the themes section as the background for their blog (at 851KB a hit). Suffice to say if you're stupid enough to give me power over the content on your website while making me pay for it bad things will be appearing

HAHAHAHAHA!!!!.... I could just picture it...

Oh if only you knew what I got up to in the quest for cyber justice!

Out of curiosity, is there a reason you can't or don't want to check the referring URL and simply have the site refuse requests when the referring URL isn't hpcfactor.com? I know my dinky web host offers 'Hotlink Protection" for my account - which simply rejects requests if the referring URL isn't the same as the domain for my account. It allows you to set up exceptions for certain file types (like HTML files) or even specific files that you want to allow hotlinks to.

Yes, the problem there is that the front end server that we're using is rather out of date with the latest web stnadards, and overhauling it to bring i up to date isn't an option. So instead of slowing the server down with such filtering requests, preventing people from getting there altogether seemed the logical step. We can use the new download centre to improve our service offering anyway, so it's relative!

Perfect hint: See my first attempt to bother a deeplinking site - very
friendly though.

http://www.weblo.com/property/real_estate/Motherboards_Upgrades/2130098/

That is great!!!