Some readers aren’t clear on why it’s hypocritical as hell for Dave Winer to invent a new HTTP header to lock out other applications from accessing the photo RSS feeds used by FlickrFan. Winer’s fearmongering about FeedBurner should make the point clear. Last year, in one of his efforts to spread FUD against Google’s feed publishing service, Winer wrote:
… if Google ties Feedburner to Google Reader that still hurts people like me, because my feed doesn’t work as well with Google Reader.
Now let’s take a deeper look at “doesn’t work as well.”
It could end up meaning “doesn’t work at all.” It’s quite possible in the second or third iteration that Google drops support for non-Feedburner feeds. It wouldn’t be unprecedented, far from it. Google Blogoscoped has a list of Google products that “prefer” other Google products. I’ve never seen Google not do this when they had the chance. The instant they bought Blogger they tied it to their toolbar. If they had used an open API the toolbar would have worked with all blogging tools. Google just doesn’t think that way, sorry to say.
The ability of one user to opt out would do absolutely nothing to stop or even diminish the negative effects of monopolistic tying. And users show no inclination to do anything for the benefit of the Internet as a whole, so there’s no reason to believe any of them would withhold their support of Feedburner just because it screws with the benefits of a level playing field in the RSS ecosystem. Certainly not enough to persuade Google not to tie the two products.
Several programmers used Winer’s new RSS feeds to display photos without FlickrFan, either because they don’t use Macs or because OPML Editor runs like ass. Those programs don’t work at all now. Winer’s belief in a level playing field in the RSS ecosystem only applies to other people.
Remember that the next time he complains about being locked in a trunk.
Well, to be fair my code works fine. I am throwing the same hash as flickrfan.root and as such get access to the magic RSS feed. If you want to as well, here’s some Python code to create the hash (it should be easily translatable into any programming language with a md5 library):
import time, hashlib
“”"Scripting News’ secret hash”"”
hashKeywords = ['and', 'beginswith', 'break', 'bundle', 'case', 'contains', 'continue', 'downto', 'else', 'endswith', 'equals', 'fileloop', 'for', 'greaterthan', 'if', 'in', 'kernel', 'lessthan', 'local', 'loop', 'not', 'notequals', 'on', 'or', 'return', 'then', 'to', 'try', 'while', 'with']
date = time.gmtime(time.time()-86400)
#format is month + hashkeywords(hour-2) + day + year hashstring = ‘%s%s%s%s’ % (date[1], hashKeywords[date[3]-2], date[2], date[0])
print (hashstring, hashlib.md5(hashstring).hexdigest())
--
>>> secretHash.py
(’2kernel272008′, ‘c779fda5da52a28893011c5562bc3695′)
Yikes, looks like Markdown bit me there. But you can get the point, a few lines of any programming language results in the hash. Include it as a non-spec header and then you can get the goodies.
This isn’t your data my friends, its someone elses. How are your rights are being violated? Do you have a license for the data you can’t access? Whose stealing from who? You guys whine a lot, like the other guy was saying. You’re wrong. Deal with it. LOL
There’s no difference Mahalo, it’s free either way (through FlickrFan or through a more sane mechanism). The photos are downloaded from the same source even so tracking isn’t affected. It’s a public web server and as such it’s fair game to be accessed. The AP/AFP could easily set up a similar paid service and I’d switch to that immediately. Just make it account based and use basic HTTP authentication like everyone else does for private RSS feeds.
But the point of the post was the hypocrisy of Dave wanting to play with everyone else’s data (Flickr, Twitter, Google, etc etc) all the while trying his best to stop anyone else from playing with his. Do onto others as you would like to be treated.
Actually, Mahalo, if you read the EULA (which Dave still hasn’t put online as far as I can tell), there’s no licensing information wrt the RSS feeds, so they’re just as much a FlickrFan user’s images as they are a non-users image.
The question we should be asking is this one: is there some reason why people using the flickrfan client should have more access to the images than a home-brewed client?
Nobody is saying Dave is outside of his rights to restrict his feed… we’re saying he’d pitch a fit if someone else did that to him. (and this post pretty aptly demonstrates that hypothesis to be true)
The issue isn’t rights, it’s hypocrisy.