There’s been a lot of fantastic work done on Bug 274784, “Make back and forward blazingly fast and side-effect free.” Well, at 3am thoughts were rolling through my mind, and I came up with a cool name for this new feature. Whiplash. I like it, a few other folks do. Let’s make it official! “Firefox 1.1: Faster, Smarter, and now with Whiplash!“

Another six gigabytes up in smoke again yesterday. Recently Slashdot ran a story that perfectly phrased a thought I’ve had for years. The Social Contract. I don’t block most ads because I feel viewing a few ads and occasionally clicking an interesting one is the least I can do in exchange for free content. I also don’t really mind TV ads, except when the SCREAM AT ME and such. I block ads from DoubleClick due to their heinous data tracking efforts, and popup ads. Those break the advertisers’ and content providers’ end of the Social Contract. But normal ads, I leave them alone, because I’m not going to break my end. The key to it is equity and fairness. Don’t make your ads evil or obnoxious, and I’ll view them.

But then there’s Fusker, a web tool to blatantly break the social contract. It’s used primarily for image and porn galleries. It allows the users to scrape all the images on a page or gallery at one time in the browser, bypassing a site’s framing and support content. In the forums they suggest disabling Referrer Logging, to bypass referrer blocks. Referrer identification is useful to servers to help prevent file and image hotlinking, a big drain on bandwidth. I moved from TCH to DreamHost specifically to get more bandwidth. I now have 6 times more than I did. But I got Fuskered again, and at this rate I’ll burn up 180 GB of my 120 GB by the end of the month. That’d leave me with -60GB, which would cost me an extra $60 this month alone. This is not good.

I’m trying to keep the Shared Media directory as open as possible, but I’m having to lock it down a touch. Most people will never notice what going on. That’s good, it means we’re abiding by the social contract. I thank you for that, and that’s why I have some stuff up for folks to enjoy.

But A few of you may be reading this when you were expecting something else. If that’s the case, you were redirected for hotlinking. You’re making it hard for other people to enjoy the stuff I’m trying to share on my nickel. I don’t ask much; don’t be a jerk.