Site protection

[jaroq]

Hi all,

I hope you all survived Xmas in fairly good shape. I've almost got the worst of the "dys" out of my dysfunctional Xmases. Stuart Smalley has NOTHING compared to my alcoholic gun-totin' mom, my part-time dad, my officially being evicted from the family just before Xmas for being "queer", and stuff like that. Okay, that's way too personal, but I'm going to leave it cuz I have a feeling it might reassure some others of my kindred out there with crazy families. I have survived the worst and will continue to survive. WE (you and me) are the ones with internet skills and ambition to succeed! And gay sex is a beautiful thing. But I'll quietly let the moderators delete me as they see fit. Yeah, I've been deleted a coupla times as a "friend" on Facebook, so I can take anything, man! :icon_razz:

Perhaps this is an appropriate prelude to my paranoid (my usual mode) question: I'm still working on restoring my "heroic fantasy" website (a homoerotic L.O.T.R. type thing), and I recall that it was already being ripped off when I took it offline years ago, and I had planned to put in safeguards to protect its content when I brought it back...which is now. It has a lot of original homoerotic artwork (some mine, some others'), beautiful (if I may say so myself) pages with gorgeous images, sound, and music (my own) that I just don't want some thief stealing and claiming (as charging) as their own.

I know there was encryption software that made stealing a website more difficult, but having been away for a while, I'm sure there are new and better things out there. Do any of y'all have recommendations in this regard - software that smoothly encrypts webpages so that they can't be ripped off?

Many thanks in advance,

Jaroq

PS: Are those who are using Cave Creek with CCBill pretty happy with that?

[PFLJayden]

Can you be more specific as to what your wanting to protect?

You can't protect images on a website or videos. If someone likes it, they will take it, and they will share it. Hence piracy is at large. If you lose sleep over content theft, you'll never sleep again and will purely die of no sleep LOL.

Anyone with a web-editor program can "steal" an entire website. Just yesterday we used Frontpage to import an old site of ours and it downloaded the entire site including videos, flv trailers, wmv's, images, and all of the html pages without any form of server access.

The only way you can legally protect it is to file a trademark with the U.S. Trademark offices on your site and it's contents. Even at that it can take up to 18 months to finalize. Even a movie copyright takes nearly a year.

You could manage the properties of the website such as disable the right click, make the site navigational without the toolbar headers. But your never going to effectively protect your website. It's impossible.

[HunkyLuke]

Yup, what Jayden says is spot-on. A few things I would recommend to help reduce theft are:
- install strongbox to protect your members areas from account sharing
- watermark your images and videos
- stay away from DRM on your videos, these may help reduce copyright but it really pisses off legit customers and there are thousands of DRM-breaking tools out there so its ineffective anyway
- talk to a company like pornguardian, they offer services for getting your content removed from various sites..I will ask them to come here and explain their services.

As for hosting, I always recommend NationalNet as these guys are the best in the business, bar none! And for billing, CCBill and Epoch are both the industry leaders and are both great choices.

Good luck revamping your project, be sure to share your progress with us too

cheers
Luke

[raymor]

As PFLJayden and HunkMoneyLuke said, there's no reasonable way to totally
content theft on the internet. On a local intranet, such as a university we worked
with, that's a different story, but on the public internet what you can do is take some
steps to reduce the negative affects, like watermarking, and some steps to keep it
under control, like Throttlebox.

DRM is the proof of this. Companies like Apple collectively spent BILLIONs trying
to "protect" their music on iTunes, Amazon's music store, WalMart.com music, etc.
Every one of the major players in music gave up and started selling their music as
plain DRM-free mp3 files that can be readily copied. Only one, Apple iTunes, sells
both "unprotected" mp3 files and "protected" files because Apple builds both the
hardware and the software used to play it, the ipod. Since they make the hardware
and software, they have enough control that they can offer DRM music along with
plain unprotected MP3s, but even they can't provide only protected content.
Unless you plan to do more R&D than Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon combined,
forget trying to prevent copying.

As suggested, watermarking your content will mean that stolen content has some
advertising value, and Strongbox will tend to keep out the thieves - people who
steal content are thieves, and so tend to use stolen passwords, and Strongbox
will keep them away from your site.

You're in luck in one way, though. Most of the stolen and posted content is stolen
by a fairly small number of people who grab tons of content. That is, the problem
isn't so much that every member will post two or three videos, but that you'll have
one or two members who rip a shitload of content. If you stop those few people,
or get them under control, that will make a significant difference.

We have a couple of projects simmering on the back burner to address these
thieves who steal in bulk, and one is available now, working well for a lot of people.
That's Throttlebox. The idea with Throttlebox is that a legitimate customer might
use your site to jack off for twenty minutes, and they might do that say twice in a day.
So the legitimate user gets about forty minutes of content in a day - a bit more if
you have long intro sequences before you get to the good part. The guys we want
to stop, on the other hand, are going to want to download as much as they can
as fast as they can, perhaps thirty to fifty hours of video overnight. We can recognize
that and put a stop to it and that's what Throttlebox does. You set some rules, or
use the default rules, that allows someone access to a reasonable amount of
content over certain time periods, so they have plenty enough to jack off to, but
they can't download everything all at once in order to go post it somewhere.

[DominicFord]

There a number of solutions, though most are cost prohibitive (+$100k). At PornGuardian.com, we are working on a watermarking system that is a lot less expensive. It help you identify who is uploading your content. It's in beta testing now, and we have already caught two pirates.

We also have a community outreach program, and through it have shut down (or at least disabled) two big blogs. As we grow will be fleecing more and more blogs of all their content. (Read our latest press release at our site (PornGuardian dot com).

Best,
Dominic

[jaroq]

Sincere thanks, Jayden, Luke, Raymor, and Dominic!!!

You guy are great! I'm so happy and proud to be a part of this group of great, supportive people! (Okay, a little too much wine tonight, but that really makes me more sincere.... If I may quote from the British writer Thomas de Quincey: "It is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety.")

Gonna definitely check out PornGuardian, Throttlebox, and Strongbox. Don't need to worry about DRM as I don't have any real video - just a few animated GIFs. It's all artwork (though realistic), no real-live humans.

I've already learned how to de-activate right clicks, and that converting regular images into .swf and audio into .mov adds some problems to those copying a site in toto. I also have a font converter (which converts the text, but only in IE, into a lovely antique calligraphic font) that probably won't easily be ripped off. I hate to force users to use IE, but Firefox doesn't recognize embedded fonts and doesn't play background sounds (of which there are many in my site - wind and surf sounds in particular).

And Luke, I'll be sure to let you know when the site comes online! I'm eager for your comments!

Jaroq

[raymor]

I've already learned how to de-activate right clicks, and that converting regular images into .swf and audio into .mov adds some problems to those copying a site in toto. I also have a font converter (which converts the text, but only in IE, into a lovely antique calligraphic font) that probably won't easily be ripped off. I hate to force users to use IE, but Firefox doesn't recognize embedded fonts and doesn't play background sounds (of which there are many in my site - wind and surf sounds in particular).

I must be misunderstanding what you're saying. You don't think you're actually
going to "force users to use IE" do you? You aren't going to force the 60%-72% of
people who use decent browsers to switch. You're just going to force them to
go another site instead of yours. According to the world wide web consortium
stats, only 28% of people use IE. W3C tends to get tech savvy visitors, Net Applications
shows IE at 58% in October and losing 1% per month. Either way, you're throwing
away roughly half of your revenue if you only sell to IE users.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
http://mashable.com/2010/12/01/brows...november-2010/

[jaroq]

I must be misunderstanding what you're saying. You don't think you're actually going to "force users to use IE" do you? You aren't going to force the 60%-72% of people who use decent browsers to switch. You're just going to force them to go another site instead of yours. According to the world wide web consortium stats, only 28% of people use IE. W3C tends to get tech savvy visitors, Net Applications shows IE at 58% in October and losing 1% per month. Either way, you're throwing away roughly half of your revenue if you only sell to IE users.

Raymore, you are not misunderstanding me. But admittedly my use of "force to use" was a very poor choice of words.

For me, it's less a matter of revenue than it is sharing the total experience of the beauty of homoerotic fantasy I've created. IE produces beautiful embedded calligraphic fonts; Firefox et al. do not. It's easy to make IE play endless background wind and surf sounds with voiceover as well, so essential to the total experience; not as simple with Firefox et al. It's simpler to stop right-click in just IE, and at least help keep the beauty where it belongs.

Yes, I know that with complex coding, I might get everything to work the same way in every browser (for a while), no matter what the browser, but that is not a frustrating complexity that I want to take on. I don't want to "get the money" so much as I simply want to "share the beauty". (Okay, maybe icky "airy fairy", but I'm an artist, not an entrepreneur.)

Raymor, if I lose revenue, so be it. Those who want to share the beautiful experience of what I have created can easily acquire IE, if only for my experience.

Yes, personally I use Firefox for almost everything, but I still have IE in reserve for certain special sites that truly excel in IE alone.

[raymor]

For me, it's less a matter of revenue than it is sharing the total experience of the beauty of homoerotic fantasy I've created. IE produces beautiful embedded calligraphic fonts;

Raymor, if I lose revenue, so be it. Those who want to share the beautiful experience of what I have created can easily acquire IE, if only for my experience.
It's easy to make IE play endless background wind and surf sounds with voiceover as well, so essential to the total experience.

We're definitely on gaywidewebmasters today. Seriously though, that's
cool. You know what the pros and cons are it sounds like.

IE produces beautiful embedded calligraphic fonts; Firefox et al. do not.

It seems Firefox just added embedded fonts about 18 months ago, in 3.5.
Safari has had embedded fonts since 3.1. Text kerning, ligatures, and multiple
weights along with support for rendering complex typographical scripts were
added in Firefox 3.0.

Yes, I know that with complex coding, I might get everything to work the same way in every browser (for a while), no matter what the browser, but that is not a frustrating complexity that I want to take on.

My experience, in case it's helpful for another project, is that generally if you
design in Firefox, you're designing toward the standards, so other browsers
including Chrome, Safari, and even IE will load the site nicely, because they all
support the same standards like HTML, CSS, etc., though some are more
standards compliant than others. No need for any significant work to make it
work in all different browsers if you design for the standard. On the other hand, if
you start with IE, my experience has been that a lot of IE specific bugs or E,E,E
"features" come up, so it looks like shit in a standard browser and needs a lot of
work to get it to look at work right in any other browser. In summary - starting
with IE leads to a lot of "cross browser" hacks, but starting with Firefox tends to
make a standards compliant site that works in any browser, including IE.

[jaroq]

We're definitely on gaywidewebmasters today.

Hahahaha!!! (Love it!!) I did wax awfully "gay aesthete" there, didn't I?!:butfly:But as often as I mentioned "total experience", I promise I'm neither in nor from California!

It seems Firefox just added embedded fonts about 18 months ago, in 3.5. Safari has had embedded fonts since 3.1. Text kerning, ligatures, and multiple weights along with support for rendering complex typographical scripts were added in Firefox 3.0.

Thanks! I did not know that. If the calligraphic fonts work, this may change my whole approach if I can get all my sound effects to work too.

My experience, in case it's helpful for another project, is that generally if you design in Firefox, you're designing toward the standards, so other browsers including Chrome, Safari, and even IE will load the site nicely, because they all support the same standards like HTML, CSS, etc., though some are more standards compliant than others. No need for any significant work to make it work in all different browsers if you design for the standard. On the other hand, if you start with IE, my experience has been that a lot of IE specific bugs or E,E,E "features" come up, so it looks like shit in a standard browser and needs a lot of work to get it to look at work right in any other browser. In summary - starting with IE leads to a lot of "cross browser" hacks, but starting with Firefox tends to make a standards compliant site that works in any browser, including IE.

Many thanks for the advice, Raymor. This certainly makes sense, and I will definitely give it a shot!