Lost forever? Archive Team says TwitPic is blocking photo downloads before shutdown

[wickedplayer494]

[url]http://www.geekwire.com/2014/archive-team-twitpic-blocking-us-downloading-photos-shutdown/[/url]

[quote=GeekWire]A volunteer group that saves data at risk of disappearing when web sites die says the founder of TwitPic is blocking their efforts to record photos that have been uploaded to the site. TwitPic announced on Sept. 4 that the service would shut down on Sept. 25.

“We think it’s a tragedy,” said Jason Scott, who heads up the Archive Team. Members of the group keep an eye out for sites that are closing up shop and then download remaining content. It offers the material to the Internet Archive, which operates the Wayback Machine, a service for looking at snapshots of Web sites in history. Most often, the Internet Archive wants the data the Archive Team saves, Scott said.

The team has been trying to download TwitPic photos since the shutdown announcement, he said. But it noticed that Noah Everett, TwitPic’s founder, started blocking their access. “We are still downloading but not with any speed because any amount of speed gets their attention and they find it,” Scott said. So far, the team has downloaded around 395,000 photos. It’s not clear how many total photos are stored with TwitPic but the service has been around since 2008 and was the first such service that allowed people to attach photos to tweets, so the volume is likely quite a bit larger.[/quote]

[Tmaxx]

how do you block one from downloading a picture?

[laserguided]

[QUOTE=Tmaxx;46007071]how do you block one from downloading a picture?[/QUOTE]

You monitor bandwidth used and then block the biggest consumers.

[pentium]

[QUOTE=Tmaxx;46007071]how do you block one from downloading a picture?[/QUOTE]

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard]robots.txt[/url]

[Swiket]

[QUOTE=Tmaxx;46007071]how do you block one from downloading a picture?[/QUOTE]

"I tried right-clicking the picture but nothing happened... I guess it's lost forever"

[pentium]

[QUOTE=Swiket;46007434]"I tried right-clicking the picture but nothing happened... I guess it's lost forever"[/QUOTE]

I remember back in the early web days there was a website that overlapped images with some sort of zone that when right clicked would pop up a window saying not to steal the image. Of course you just looked in your browser cache and there it was.

[sloppy_joes]

[QUOTE=pentium;46007420][URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard"]robots.txt[/URL][/QUOTE]

I think the keyword is cooperating.

[Drsalvador]

What an arsehole.

[mezzokoko]

What a bunch of twits ...

[Murk]

[QUOTE=pentium;46007420][url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard]robots.txt[/url][/QUOTE]

Except robots.txt is a matter of courtesy, not enforcement. Also, their robots file is empty.

You generally block based on IP by monitoring traffic. You can completely automate that if you wish.

[ChrisR7]

Gonna be a lot of Print-screening going on.