mjvqsl at gmail
Jul 17, 2007, 9:14 PM
Post #5 of 7
(699 views)
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Re: Possible live mirroring, stealing of brandwith
[In reply to]
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Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@...> writes:
>
> > I thought the procedure was to report it to
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Live_mirrors
>
> PS In fact, that page explicitly says *not* to report them to this
> mailing list. We definitely need to get our message straight.
>
I am the user who initiated this thread; it was kindly posted by Casey B, as I
was unsure as what to do.
Apparently we have two distinct issues to deal with:
#1: Improve the FAQ and self-help messages so that folks who wish to report or
act upon these "live mirrors" would know what to do (and not add noise to this
group).
#2: Figure out if some form of IP-based filtering or other deterrent should be
used against this particular site, and/or "live mirrors" in general.
To address #2 first:
>> ... and generally the devs tell me that whenever they block one,
>> it will spring up from another IP, and that they don't bother ...
This indicates that WP tech folks are generally discouraged about implementing
any IP filtering as the sites tend to work around such measures.
That's a fair position: "Let's not do anything unless it becomes too much of a
resource drain".
As a occasional contributor, I certainly won't try and tell more dedicated or
permanent folks what to do. My only suggestion is
to maybe mine the web usage logs/stats with the goal of identifying the worst
offenders and possibly target these above a particular threshold for action
(GFDL emails / propose them off-line mirroring / filter to deny service or to
return "bogus" pages)
Of course, if this type of abuse eventually becomes too much of a nuisance, one
could introduce a semi-automated way to red-tag the offending IPs;
discussing ideas about how to achieve this is obviously beyond the scope of this
thread, and indeed probably a topic for a more private forum, lest we help the
would-be-offenders, by offering to much transparency.
Now, _because_ of this potentially lax enforcement, the issue #1 should be dealt
with particular caution and with the following goals:
-be clear and easily located in the appropriate help / FAQ / Wizards
-provide a [simple] procedure of sorts that would be satisfactory to WP users
who try and report this type of abuse
-include some language that may discourage potential implementers of "live
mirrors", or for the least not hint in any way at the fact that WP currently
doesn't do anything about this issue.
In the spirit of moving forward, here's a draft for something that may serve the
above.
[.Attention, IANAL and quite the newbie with regards to WP's policies. What
follows certainly requires review by more qualified people]
Live "mirror" sites:
===================
Some sites query WP behind the scene and integrate WP's pages' content, verbatim
or somewhat modified, within their own web pages.
This practice is illegal, _even_ if the resulting page includes the proper GDFL
notice and WP credit.
One should ensure sure that such sites are actually live "mirrors" rather than
off-line (legal) mirrors. For example one can check that recently modified
pages such as these listed in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges
are in effect provided at the suspected site in their latest version.
Such sites should be reported on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Live_mirrors so
they can be blocked and/or legal action may be undertaken if appropriate.
Site managers who wish to provide a regular mirror (legal) of WP can do so by
following the instructions at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Forking_FAQ.
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