Comments on: More on Dave Winer’s FlickrFan Lock-In

By: EyeOnWiner

EyeOnWiner — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:43:25 +0000

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.

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:11:33 +0000

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.

By: Mr. Mahalo

Mr. Mahalo — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:37:24 +0000

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

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:56:23 +0000

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.

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:55:29 +0000

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')