That link is highly suspicious I think it needs removing

Is this not the Image Sleuth section? What do you mean suspicious?

When I clicked on it, it opened a diversion page

Guys, I'm warning you about a website that facilitates stealing images from stock sites, and your concern is the semantics of the word sleuth?

The "diversion page" is the CloudFlare DDoS protection, it's something automatic when a page gets too many hits. It's a service that can be implemented on any site.

that website does something strange, diverting to a "checking your browser" page. I didn't wait to see what comes next.  My point about sleuthing wasn't semantics. If the site allows people to use it to remove watermarks then it is a tool and by itself is not doing anything wrong (after all, photoshop allows you to remove watermarks, even if it would be hard work), if it is redistributing images then that is a different matter and should be brought to the attention of the sites concerned, but that may be a bit difficult if there aren't any watermarks.

And now you have posted two posts, two links to this scum, helping them with advertising. change the url to something not a clickable link.

And now you have posted two posts, two links to this scum, helping them with advertising. change the url to something not a clickable link.

This forum is the last place I would expect to find the beneficiaries of that website, so I'm not really concerned about advertising it here. Or so I hope.

It needs to be as visible as possible among us so that many of us send reports to affected stock sites in order to get this cancer taken down fast.

You are definitely right about SEO. Before posting I looked around to give the links a nofollow tag in the forum format, but I couldn't find anything. Any ideas how I could do that?

You are definitely right about SEO. Before posting I looked around to give the links a nofollow tag in the forum format, but I couldn't find anything. Any ideas how I could do that?

usually i just do something like �double u times 3 dot tomato dot to� or something like that.

Reported cloudflare about it.

Reported cloudflare about it.

My attempt failed. I was hit with a reply which basically said that as I wasn't the copyright holder I couldn't make a claim.

I hovered my hands over the keyboard ready to explain how my own images were potentially in jeopardy, but I felt it would fall on deaf ears...

Quote from: cloudvisual on December 17, 2018, 17:46

Quote from: CrFx on December 17, 2018, 08:33

Reported cloudflare about it.

My attempt failed. I was hit with a reply which basically said that as I wasn't the copyright holder I couldn't make a claim.

I hovered my hands over the keyboard ready to explain how my own images were potentially in jeopardy, but I felt it would fall on deaf ears...

I'm ignorant in these matters, but do I understand it right that Cloudflare are making their money by stopping sites involved with illegality (in this case stealing images from Shutterstock) from being taken down or interfered with?

No, not at all. CloudFlare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Without doubt, at least one (likely all) of the major stock agencies will rely on a CDN. (AWS, CloudFlare, Rackspace, MAXCDN)

A CDN offers to deliver your website to customers from their nearest web server which reduces load times. For example, P5 is a NYC based agency and will likely have a customer from Australia. There is a significant lag for someone from Oz to request a video preview and have it delivered fast to Oz from NY. So what a CDN does is offer to deliver a copy of your website from their Oz datacenter and essentially deliver the video in the fastest possible way to the customer without them thinking there's an overseas delay.

The issue is that these websites are now being hosted by a third party company. Whilst they aren't directly responsible for what they're being asked to host, they do require their clients to sign terms to agree not to use their hosting services for illegal purposes (one would be the aforementioned website).

So CloudFlare and other CDNs don't stop anything illegal from being hosted, until it's reported, unless they pick up on it themselves. The illegal bit they DO stop is a DDOS attack - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

The CDNs attempt to stop and hinder these DDOS attacks as a priority because it directly hinders their own servers. So it's very common for small websites with little to no traffic, but with great risk of attempted shutdowns to use a CDN as a means of protection. All that any stock agency has to do to shut a website like this down is to find a company who performs DDOS attacks and pay them to hammer the site. My guess to attack this site (without a CDN backing it) would be about $10-50 a day. As a comparison, with the CDN active, I couldn't put a price on it - these companies pride themselves on protecting your website from these attacks.

Quote from: obj owl on December 17, 2018, 18:00

Quote from: cloudvisual on December 17, 2018, 17:46

Quote from: CrFx on December 17, 2018, 08:33

Reported cloudflare about it.

My attempt failed. I was hit with a reply which basically said that as I wasn't the copyright holder I couldn't make a claim.

I hovered my hands over the keyboard ready to explain how my own images were potentially in jeopardy, but I felt it would fall on deaf ears...

I'm ignorant in these matters, but do I understand it right that Cloudflare are making their money by stopping sites involved with illegality (in this case stealing images from Shutterstock) from being taken down or interfered with?

No, not at all. CloudFlare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Without doubt, at least one (likely all) of the major stock agencies will rely on a CDN. (AWS, CloudFlare, Rackspace, MAXCDN)

A CDN offers to deliver your website to customers from their nearest web server which reduces load times. For example, P5 is a NYC based agency and will likely have a customer from Australia. There is a significant lag for someone from Oz to request a video preview and have it delivered fast to Oz from NY. So what a CDN does is offer to deliver a copy of your website from their Oz datacenter and essentially deliver the video in the fastest possible way to the customer without them thinking there's an overseas delay.

The issue is that these websites are now being hosted by a third party company. Whilst they aren't directly responsible for what they're being asked to host, they do require their clients to sign terms to agree not to use their hosting services for illegal purposes (one would be the aforementioned website).

So CloudFlare and other CDNs don't stop anything illegal from being hosted, until it's reported, unless they pick up on it themselves. The illegal bit they DO stop is a DDOS attack - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

The CDNs attempt to stop and hinder these DDOS attacks as a priority because it directly hinders their own servers. So it's very common for small websites with little to no traffic, but with great risk of attempted shutdowns to use a CDN as a means of protection. All that any stock agency has to do to shut a website like this down is to find a company who performs DDOS attacks and pay them to hammer the site. My guess to attack this site (without a CDN backing it) would be about $10-50 a day. As a comparison, with the CDN active, I couldn't put a price on it - these companies pride themselves on protecting your website from these attacks.

CDNs are all basically extra places for your data to live, so that it can be served up from the closest location and, in event of failure, maintain operation. Rackspace servers like ~$500/mo or something.