Monthly Archive for February, 2005

Tricks to fight right-click image copying

Published on February 26, 2005 in internet and webdev. 3 Comments


An image like the one on the right (using the standard <img> tag) can easily be copied by any visitor: right-click the image and select “Save Picture As” or “Copy Image”. In cases where the author wants to protect his images from copying, there are a couple of ways to make the copying harder. Not make it impossible, just less trivial.
The fact that you can get the image by checking the HTML (“View Source”) is something that is difficult to avoid, and in any case, the vistor could always take a screen shot and trim the result to have only the image. So I’ll just focus on disabling the “Save/Copy Image” functionality.

Remark: there are ways to make all Right-Click functionality inaccessible. I think this is a bad practice (for the reasons, check jeffdav), so I will not cover these methods.

Trick #1: Table Background

You use the image as the table background: <TABLE STYLE="background-image: url(...)">. If you do just that, the “Save Picture As” option goes away, but a new “Save Background” is created. So you cover up the image by placing a transparent gif before it, in the <TD> cell.

The end effect is that is looks like you can copy or save the picture, but you will be saving the GIF file.

Remark: you have to explicitly specify the dimensions of the table, it will not autoscale to the size of the image.


Trick #2: Div Background

You can do basically the same thing with a <div>: you use the picture as the background image, and you put another <DIV> above it with the transparent GIF.

You would again need to specify the exact dimensions of the whole thing, but wait, there’s another trick: put the image in an <IMG> tag inside the second DIV and give it a visibility: hidden. This way it takes up the size of the picture without actually showing up, or appearing right-clickable.


Trick #3: Flash image

The third is a no-brainer: using a Flash object. Almost 100% of browsers have Flash built-in, so compatibility problems are limited. For the exact OBJECT and EMBED, check the HTML source of this text or the Macromedia site.
Here also, you need to give the right dimensions to the Flash object, otherwise it will take a default (square) size.

Remark: using the menu="false" option ensures that the only options showing up on a right-click are: “Settings…” (disabled) and “About Macromedia Flash Player …”.


Conclusion
It is possible to use some simple tricks to make right-click copy or save functionality impossible. I wouldn’t go as far as to call this ‘copyright protection’, but it helps. At least no one can claim they just copied it because they thought it would be OK.
I used the last option (Flash) on my Tango Steps site, to protect the images I use from my teachers, Marisa and Oliver.

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Blogging about bloggers blogging

Published on February 21, 2005 in Belgium. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

I will not be posting an update for the ‘Belgian Popular Blogs‘ today because I haven’t had the time yet to add Technorati/PubSub scores. Since I expect this will shake up the listing in a significant way, I want to do it right.

I have had some publicity for the list through Maarten and De Standaard and of course some bloggers have taken the opportunity to take a piss at the initiative. So some clarification: I started the list because of poor Astrid Wittebolle’s article in De Morgen, where she had the audacity to list the Top-5 Belgian bloggers. The indignation afterwards (“No, I was first!”) was amusing, but I realised I probably only knew the tip of the iceberg of Belgian bloggers. Since there was no adequate top whatever, I started making one myself. The project combines some of my pet topics – social software, search engine metrics, Excel statistics – so it’s fun to do.

Some blogs are not included because it is impossible to get the right numbers. I only include blogs with their own domain name. If someone publishes on users.skynet.be/jamesdoe/blog/page.html, then I don’t include that. Maybe in the future I will, but for now, I can’t get significant statistics.

The results, as I have claimed from the beginning, have nothing to do with the ‘quality’ of the blog, just the quantitative, measurable criteria like link popularity, PageRank, … My idea of what blogs are worth reading or not does not enter into the picture. For example, I believe the De Standaard blog has great value as a cross-over between traditional media and the blogosphere. But it is not featured in the Top #30, because its numbers are not high enough (yet?). When I will add blog-specific ratings (Technorati, Feedster, PubSub, BlogLines, …) it might climb up, or not. I have no idea yet.

And to end a little quote (in Dutch, sorry) about the ‘VLD-syndrome’ from pietel.be, one of the good (my own personal opinion and all that) blogs I discovered by creating this list:

Dit is een kwaal waarbij je zodanig met jezelf en het kappen op je blog-genoten bezig bent, dat je het eigen publiek totaal uit het oog verliest. Je blogt om gelezen, bekeken of beluisterd te worden en natuurlijk heeft iedereen die hiermee bezig is de pretentie of het ego om te pretenderen dat je iets te vertellen hebt. Anders begin je er niet aan. Ca va de soi, non?
(from: pietel.be)

QuotePlay and portable SMIL

Published on February 19, 2005 in media and podcast. Closed


Matt Round had released QuotePlay, a Flash-based MP3 player for playing specific parts (‘quotes’) of an MP3 sound file. A bit like <blockquote> for sound, and a handy way to cite podcasters.

I remember Jon Udell talking about a different approach for the same problem:

Peter van Dijck wrote to tell me about his tool for converting the URL of a Real stream, plus start/stop times, into a link to the specified segment. A while ago, I mentioned Rich Persaud’s version of the same idea (PFOR: AutoMeta’s RPXP), which works with Windows Media and QuickTime as well as Real. Using either of these, you can do what I did the other day — namely, link to a segment within a video stream — without hacking URLs and wrapper files.
(from Jon Udell’s Blog – May 13, 2004)

The RPXP tool works by generating a RAM/ASX/SMIL meta file on the spot by processing the ‘start’/'stop’ information in the URL. Instantaneously generated playlist files, sounds a lot like Webjay, right?

Which brings me to a related topic: wouldn’t it be great for future portable MP3/WMA players to support the ASX (Windows Media) and SMIL (Quicktime/RealPlayer/MP3) playlist format? There are already devices that support music + images (the iPod photo, the iRiver H10) and even movies (the iRiver PMC140, the Zen Portable Media Center). It would be so easy to glue the audio and video together in playlist files to create slideshows, partial playback (like the above QuotePlay), reuse of the same intro/outro audio for different playlists, …

For the moment, the iPod supports M3U playlists (audio only – but m3u does not support start and end times) and the iPod photo can show album art, i.e. visual metadata embedded in the MP3 file. Both features are very limited.

Imagine a Powerpoint-2-SMIL export functionality that enables you to take your presentation on your portable player, and hook it up to an overhead projector. Imagine a package of 1 video file with 3 soundtracks – each in a different language – and different subtitles, all glued together by a set of small playlist files. Imagine creating a playlist on-the-fly that contains the most memorable quotes ina 90-minute speech, and that is sync’ed with your PC.

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Domain names in Flanders and Wallonie: the digital divide

Published on February 18, 2005 in Belgium. 2 Comments


DNS.be, the Belgian non-profit organisation that manages the .be domain, has published new statistics on domain name distribution in Belgium. They added geographical statistics for e.g. the domain names per inhabitant in 2004. Some numbers:

  • 1000 Brussels: 18,2 domains/100 inhabitants (or ‘dom/100′)
  • 2000 Antwerp: 16,2 dom/100
  • 3000 Leuven: 9,5 dom/100 (but 3118 Werchter: 35 dom/100!)
  • 3500 Hasselt: 7,6 dom/100
  • 4000 Liege: 2,5 dom/100 (but Sankt Vith: 14,2 dom/100)
  • 5000 Namur: 3,5 dom/100
  • 6000 Charleroi: 2,8 dom/100
  • 7000 Mons: 2,5 dom/100
  • 8000 Brugge: 5,4 dom/100
  • 9000 Gent: 7,2 dom/100

Wallonie may seem already a bit behind here, but it gets worse when you go outside of the major cities: where in Flanders most villages/municipalities have on average > 2 domain per 100 inhabitants (like my hometown: 8840 Staden: 4,6 dom/100), in Wallonie not even half of the villages have one domain name per 100 inhabitants. This gives contrasts like: 3300 Tienen: 2,9 dom/100, and 1357 Hélécine, right next door: 0,7 dom/100.

This reminds me of the launch we did of the StaatsbladClip email newsletter: the subscriptions were 10 to 1 Flemish. In the weekend, we would have peaks of the Dutch-language subscriptions, whereas then the traffic on the French-language newsletter would be just about dead. Flemish people go home and switch on the PC. In Wallonie, they put on their boots and go hunting.

Some more weird numbers:

  • being close to France does not seem to incite more DNS activity, however being close to Germany (the Rocherath/Sankt Vith area) has a positive effect.
  • what’s with 3461 Molenbeek (Bekkevoort)? Every town in the vicinity has a normal score (1,5-3 dom/100) but they are at 0,4. Is there some other demographic responsible for this (like: no ADSL available there, average age > 75 years)?
  • the 2nd best score is for 1831 Diegem: 20 dom/100, which might have something to do with the number of IT companies in its industry parks. But why does Werchter score 35 dom/100? Who registered those 1091 domains? Rock Werchter? A pro-active DNS registrar?

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