Have you ever heard of hotlinking?
I hadn’t and I’ve been blogging for five years.
Thing is, blog etiquette and net etiquette and rather fluid things.
Everyone has to start somewhere and most of us on over 71 million blogs online are not technical. Most of us will never be technical, we all learn our net manners as we go along.
The Family Research Council is not happy with a journalist for hotlinking. So not happy they decided to teach him a lesson. Joe Carter of The Evangelical Outpost and Justin Taylor of Between Two Worlds (ed: mistake it was Jared Bridges) decided that Max Blumenthal, whom Joe Carter calls a ‘professional gadfly’ needed to be taught a hotlinking lesson, not once, but two days in a row.
I pay X number of dollars a year for space on a server. I can go into the control panel and look at a bar graph that shows me how much of that paid for bandwidth this blog is using. That’s my mad money btw, so I need to check and make sure I’m not spending more than I can afford.
If I exceed what I’ve paid for, BDBO would show up to visitors as a 404 - Server Error Bandwidth Exceeded. It stays that way until I pay up and the server techs put the blog back online. It happened to me once and it wasn’t something I knew how to adjust or ‘fix.’ I didn’t even understand what the error message was. I learned, same way everyone learns. Experience.
Hotlinking takes someone else’s bandwidth. Hot linking is also called leeching, bandwidth stealing or direct linking.
Web Shoppe explains. Bandwidth is really data transfer, and when you put up an image from another site there is a way to do it that doesn’t take their resources.
When you find an image you like, and that you’re allowed to use, right-click on it and select Save As. Store it somewhere on your hard drive, where you’ll be able to find it later, for the moment. Then upload the image to your web-server, and call it using the following code:
code stuff inserted here:^)
Now you’re linking to an image on your own server, using your own bandwidth, rather than stealing someone else’s! Doesn’t it feel good?
Now I know.
So does Max Blumenthal.
Blumenthal writes at The Huffington Post, he has his own blog, he also publishes at Talk2Action, and a few other media outlets, like The Nation and Media Matters for America.
He wrote a piece about Christopher Hitchens (another writer) this week, and decided to put a 2005 picture of Hitchens with the staff of The Family Research Council up with his article.
For all intensive purposes the picture went with his story line.
His mistake was he hotlinked the picture (image) from the FRC server instead of downloading the image onto his computer and then uploading it onto the servers of the sites he writes for.
I understand his mistake.
One column, several sites.
Busy, busy.
Joe Carter of the FRC and Justin Taylor decided it was payback time for using FRC bandwidth.
So, they went into their site took out their image code and put another one in.
Since the image is on the FRC site, it is their code.
The new image shows up where the original hotlink (image/picture) was.
The Blumenthal hotlink lesson was promptly admitted in posts at The Evangelical Outpost and The Family Research Council.
Did anyone at The Family Research Council send Max Blumenthal an email saying, ”Hi Max, you are taking our bandwidth. Here is what hotlinking is, please don’t do this again.”
I don’t know.
Did anyone at The Family Research Council send an email to, “Dear Admin, your writer Max hotlinked, would you fix that please?”
I don’t know.
I do know Blumenthal flipped out. He thought The Huffington Post, his blog, The Smirking Chimp and Talk2Action had been hacked. (all sites his article appeared on)
Update: KKK paypal and friend of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, Tony Perkins, has orchestrated the hacking of this post. In doing so, he has drawn greater attention to his links to and ideological support for white supremacists. The photo of Christopher Hitchens posing with the Family Research Council’s Witherspoon Fellows was scrubbed from FRC’s site today out of fear that I would link to it again. Not only does the FRC want to suppress Perkins’ links to white supremacists, it wants to suppress its own association with Hitchens. This begs the question: who embarrasses Perkins more, the Klan or Christopher Hitchens?
I would have flipped out too.
I would not have known what to think.
Those of us who don’t do code would find an image substitution in our work very scary. I wouldn’t personally draw a political conclusion, but it makes sense Blumenthal did.
That is not his normal, measured writing.
Did he hot link on purpose?
I don’t know.
If you are busy writing and posting and don’t know what a hotlink is, seeing an image you put up replaced looks exactly like a hack.
It took me about an hour digging through computer dictionaries before I found an explanation of a hotlink that I understood.
The Talk2Action webmaster/technician got it right away.
Sweet! Thanks FRC! Glad to see a sense of humor.
The usual crowd over at The Evangelical Outpost had a good giggle over teaching Max Blumenthal hotlink etiquette.
I have no idea what the technicians at The Huffington Post were thinking because the hot link wasn’t fixed.
Seeing an image replacement that looks like a hack, a writer would probably go back into his copy, grab the original link again and throw it back up. Makes sense to me. That is what I would do, and I suspect what most of us would do if we didn’t realize we were hotlinking and it’s inappropriate.
So today, Joe Carter and the Family Research Council took it up a notch.
This time they inserted images to 14 different websites calling it ‘Max Blumenthal’s Favorite Stops on the Interwebs.’
Looks like the technicians at The Huffington Post figured it out.
Technicians are there to watch a writer’s back.
I know because I’ve had amazing people over the past five years watching mine.
My writing, my blog and I would not be online without their amazing skills and help.
I thank every one of them for their patience, their kindness and their willingness to understand we all have different strengths.
Does this distract from what Max Blumenthal is attempting to say?
Yes.
And I wonder if that may have been the point to the ‘hotlink lesson.’
Blumenthal is best known as the investigative reporter that uncovered the information Tony Perkins of The Family Research Council bought a mailing list from Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, when Perkins ran a Louisiana senatorial campaign in 1996. Blumenthal has a lot of good investigative reporting in him, and I suspect he’s not cut out to be a tech.
I think he is busy writing, which is what he is good at.
I not at all sure he knew any more than most of us do what a hot link is.
The clues are in the response by the webmaster at Talk2Action and Blumenthals reaction.
Do the technicians over at The Huffington Post need to understand they have good writers and they need to watch their backs?
Apparently not.
If their writers are hotlinking, then maybe Huffington Post technicians need to help them find an easier and more appropriate way to get their work and images online.
A picture of a cute kitten is a wilful double entendre in the politically charged world of the FRC and Max Blumenthal.
Being online isn’t a should/shouldn’t know everything proposition.
There is no need anyone feel shame or be shamed because they don’t know all the web etiquette yet.
The FRC web team got their attention at Blumenthal’s expense by day two, and the prank became the message.
When a public coding lesson distracts from investigative writing and degenerates into a political slug match, everyone loses.
Thank you to technicians around the world that take that deep breath and put up with us lesser mortals with perseverance, humour, steadiness and grace.
Update: This escalated quickly into going for each others throats. “we decided to use it to pull a silly, juvenile prank. We figured that he would be a bit miffed, a bit miffedd a touch embarrassed…he would be able to take a joke without becoming emotionally unhinged.” Max Blumenthal is calling Joe Carter a Racist’s racist. Forget political slug match, it’s become personalized enfantin virtrol with each seeing how much blood they can draw. Quelle surprise.
Published 1 year, 4 months ago
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Yeah, well, being able to code, I have never ‘hotlinked’
but in a piece I wrote about the movie C.R.A.Z.Y I was naive enough to include a photo of Marc-André Grondin - star of said movie - I couldn’t understand what was happening with my blog, the increased traffic was amazing: until I found that a bunch of pubescent females had leeched onto the photo - it is now all over the place in their chatrooms. I may just have pull a stunt of my own…
Wait for the virtual squeals as I substitute an image of Donald Trump.
It was hotlinking that took down Ian’s Messy Desk almost two years ago. Reporting the hotlinkers to their hosting services and to MySpace -where many of the hotlinks originated- accomplished nothing. Removing the images did nothing, because the calls to the server were still coming in. Eventually, I put a redirect in a .htaccess file that sent all requests for the images in question to one of my other domains, where traffic was not so high.
The whole thing cost me big. I lost a huge portion of my posts and spent weeks trying to recover what I could; some have never been recovered. I lost readers from weeks of intermittent site access; about a 50% drop. I am only just returning to the previous traffic levels, two years later. And, I spend more on hosting services to increase bandwidth and server space.
Donald Trump. That is so cruel.:^)
I haven’t had problems with hotlinking (yet) but I can fully appreciate the cost. I think the term leeching sums it up.
Glad you were able to sort it out and put a file in Ian, it most certainly costs more than money.
You have your facts wrong. It wasn’t Justin Taylor.
My conclusion from the whole thing is not that Max Blumenthal was hacked, but rather that he is a hack. I find the FRC’s version of what happened with Tony Perkins in the Senatorial campaign to be far more credible than Blumenthal’s diatribe: http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=LH05F09
Bill thank you. I was wrong, it’s fixed.
My apologies to both Justin and Jared.
Russ - As a writer, Max Blumenthal is a public figure, the whole point is to draw your own conclusions about his information.
As for Tony Perkins, whether he was aware of the source of the list or not, the fine by the The Federal Election Commission was real.
If he was aware of the neo-confederate reputation and history of The Council of Conservative Christians or not, he chose to speak to them.
They are considered racist by the NAACP, LULAC, SPLC ADL, and CPAC.
Here is some information from The Vancouver Sun regarding the 1996 campaign and Perkins acknowledgement of his speech to the Council of Conservative Christians.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200702100003
Again, Perkins is a public figure, whether there was intent, the facts are real.
Bene As a writer, Max Blumenthal is a public figure, the whole point is to draw your own conclusions about his information.
If the information were valid, then “drawing your own conclusion” would be the proper response. But both Max and The Nation have lost credibility because they refuse to correct the errors in the story.
As for Tony Perkins, whether he was aware of the source of the list or not, the fine by the The Federal Election Commission was real.
That’s certainly true. But because the FEC believed that he was unaware, they dropped the fine from $80,000 to $3,000.
If he was aware of the neo-confederate reputation and history of The Council of Conservative Christians or not, he chose to speak to them.
That’s true, and he has never disputed that fact. State politicians are a lot like bloggers. They interact with people and groups everyday that they really know nothing about. Did the Edwards campaign really know that much about Amanda Marcotte when they hired her? Probably not. So they suffered the “guilt by association.” The same is true of Perkins who was devastated to find that he had spoken to a racist organization.
They are considered racist by the NAACP, LULAC, SPLC ADL, and CPAC.
As well as by the GOP, the DNC, FRC, and anyone else who has read much about them.
Here is some information from The Vancouver Sun regarding the 1996 campaign and Perkins acknowledgement of his speech to the Council of Conservative Christians.
Guess who wrote that article you linked to? That’s right: Max Blumenthal. Notice a pattern? Ever time this story comes up his name is attached. Do you really think if there was anything to it that CNN, ABC, the BBC, the NYT, etc., would just ignore it? They aren’t exactly friendly to FRC.
Yes, a US link unfortunately. Canada.com archives are not accessible.
The Vancouver Sun article(s) were not written by Blumenthal.
The Southern Poverty Law Centre report(s) were not written by Blumenthal.
The Vancouver Sun cited Blumentahl, correct attribution, common practise, appropriate ‘pattern.’
Perkins was in his second term in the Louisiana house when he spoke at the Council.
I remain skeptical he didn’t know, given he had also worked in law enforcement and media in his home state.
He had seasoned staff to vet his appearances.
He’d already been involved with the Family Forum he helped start for five years, it’s plausible he did know what he was doing and who he hung out with.
Yes, in state (or any) politics, he’d have to rub shoulders with the fringes, you want to play you pay, guilt by association is a reality.
Perkins is not a moderate and most certainly not stupid, facts in the public record remain true no matter who originally broke the story.
I don’t know what Perkins feels, if you say he is devestated, there is no reason not to believe you.
Bene Perkins was in his second term in the Louisiana house when he spoke at the Council. I remain skeptical he didn’t know, given he had also worked in law enforcement and media in his home state.
BD, I lived in a Southern state for almost all my life and I never once heard of that group. Most people–including those in law enforcement and the media–had never heard of them. They are a small fringe group that almost no one heard of until recently.
He had seasoned staff to vet his appearances.
No, actually, he didn’t. State legislators in Louisiana don’t have staffs at all. In fact, during the time he was a representative, the annual salary was $16,800 with a $6,000 expense account. That’s barely above the poverty level, so most legislators have another job on the side.
He’d already been involved with the Family Forum he helped start for five years, it’s plausible he did know what he was doing and who he hung out with.
Again, the LA Family Forum is small organization with a staff of five (not all of whom are paid). It’s not too surprising that someone who started a small politically insignificant organization would not know about other small politically insignificant organizations liked the CCC.
Perkins is not a moderate and most certainly not stupid, facts in the public record remain true no matter who originally broke the story.
Yes, he spoke at a luncheon for the CCC. That’s never been disputed. The SPLC lists dozens of other politicians who also spoke at their events without realizing what the group stands for. Where’s the “story” in that? Is there any evidence ever been presented that Perkins is a racist? No. The only one who has ever made such a stupid, slanderous accusation is Max. B. Of course, he also says the same about me and relies on “evidence” that is even flimsier. So that sort of tells you what sort of credibility he has as a “journalist.”
It is always a story Joe. You enter the public arena, you are a story. In his way up the political ladder Perkins took hand ups and hand outs from white supremacists.
That is out in the open, documented associations and admissions of such are not flimsy evidence.
He regrets that.
That is a story same as Wiley Drake and the Army of God is a story, or the Bush family association with Sun Myung Moon is a story.
Politics is a culture of personality, I didn’t make those rules.
Which brings us full circle.
Part of your job is to watch your boss’s back. Perkins has people now, he is on the national stage, and his fortunes will rise and fall on any number of variables.
His words are available for people to decide for themselves who Perkins is, and part of your job is to provide that access.
Max Blumenthal wrote you were a racist’s racist, a few days after his ‘hotlinking lesson,’ his fear, anger and his technical ineptitude public.
Why he hit you and not Bridges is anyone’s guess, but hit you he did. Took your words and didn’t make his case. Stomped all over your blog. Autopsied.
I see no evidence you are a racist, and I am sorry you have been falsely accused.
The Family Research Council website was hotlinked.
You and your co-worker Jared Bridges chose to respond publicly. Those facts are not in dispute.
In the ‘hotlink lesson’ you told us a story, one with sub-texts. Politics. Laws. People. Loyalty. Trust. Stewardship.
Friends. Enemies.
Somewhere in this story I believe, is God.
I’m tired.
As always enlightening, thanks.
Go under the Mercy.