*
Well, this is certainly ironic... Not half a year ago my profs at college sang praise of the work I was doing and how helpful it was to publish my notes, calculations and papers on the web. This took a turn today when I received an e-mail from my mentor, asking me to remove all of my work from the web.
Apparently there is no honor among peers and there's a bunch of students that decided to be assholes and completely rip off my work. Of course it was never my intention to help people commit fraud at college. I have faith in my peers and counted on fellow students to have the balls to do their own work.
Publishing my schoolwork was always meant to be an inspiration for fellow students, possibly helping them along in their own pursuits. It'd be great if a glance or two at my work had helped them over that little bump they'd run into. I explicitly mention on my site that people shouldn't be dicks and that my work is not meant to be turned in as their own. I warn the readers that any repercussions following plagiarism of my work are their own responsibility and that I won't be held accountable for their assholish behaviour.
Anyway... It's dilemma time! I dislike the thought of hampering my old profs in their daily work. They made me feel at home at
HU and they taught me a lot. On the other hand, I believe that removing my work from the web will only amount to fighting symptoms. Students will always share papers among themselves, it's just that mine are more visible. Besides, it's a very real possibility that at least a dozen students have already downloaded every single file I put up on the web, so it's impossible to stamp out any copying from my work.
I explained to my mentor that this high visibility of my work could also work in their advantage. If they'd consider using anti-plagiarism software like
Ephorus, all the work turned in by students would be automatically checked against any papers findable through the web including mine.
I'll be honest and admit that having my work up on my site is also in part down to my sense of pride. I'm fscking proud of all the hard work I did last school year and I believe that my papers are also a testimony to my qualities in documentation and education. Call it my portfolio if you will.
I'll mull things over a bit and have another chat with my profs. Let's see if we can find some common ground in this.
Posted in:
homework
,
plagiarism
,
stealing
,
students
,
term paper
*
Gah! I'd never given this much thought, until tonight: the topic of
hotlinking, ie "stealing someone's bandwidth by linking directly to their images".
My web space contains copious amounts of pictures. A lot of them are used for my blogposts, but a big bunch of bigger/heavier pictures get used in my articles. There's my
Arrow Emblem gallery, for example. As I said I never gave it any thought that people might link to my images for their own benefits. That is, until I
tailed my web server's access logs for a while tonight.
Good $DEITY! Images from my site get used on dozens of fora and a whole bunch of Facebook and MySpace accounts! D: Why is that so bad? Because these
schmucks all use -my- bandwidth to show pretty pictures for -their- fun and/or profit! I'd be fine with them using my images, as long as they host them themselves.
So... After reading up on the subject a little bit I managed to hack together a .htaccess file that prevents the use of any of my multimedia (pics, music, movies) on another site, except the ones of my choosing. Anyone who -does- decide to steal my stuff gets the following image.
My most important source for this little nugget of information was the
Smarter image hotlinking prevention article at AListApart.com.
Posted in:
bandwidth
,
hate
,
hotlinking
,
scum
,
stealing
*
Gah! I'd never given this much thought, until tonight: the topic of
hotlinking, ie "stealing someone's bandwidth by linking directly to their images".
My web space contains copious amounts of pictures. A lot of them are used for my blogposts, but a big bunch of bigger/heavier pictures get used in my articles. There's my
Arrow Emblem gallery, for example. As I said I never gave it any thought that people might link to my images for their own benefits. That is, until I
tailed my web server's access logs for a while tonight.
Good $DEITY! Images from my site get used on dozens of fora and a whole bunch of Facebook and MySpace accounts! D: Why is that so bad? Because these
schmucks all use -my- bandwidth to show pretty pictures for -their- fun and/or profit! I'd be fine with them using my images, as long as they host them themselves.
So... After reading up on the subject a little bit I managed to hack together a .htaccess file that prevents the use of any of my multimedia (pics, music, movies) on another site, except the ones of my choosing. Anyone who -does- decide to steal my stuff gets the following image.
My most important source for this little nugget of information was the
Smarter image hotlinking prevention article at AListApart.com.
Posted in:
bandwidth
,
hate
,
hotlinking
,
scum
,
stealing