What happens when you rip off a site but forget to host the JS yourself

http://www.dsignio.com.ar/

by chamtastic • 14 years ago

73 79 14 years ago

dsignio.com.ar

Some company in Argentina ripped off a friend of mine's site, but didn't even bother to host the JS themselves. So he did this. Original site is http://www.socketstudios.com/

SpaceDragon• 14 years ago

Good on them. A little backstory would be great though.

SocketStudios9• 14 years ago

A little backstory: They stole my site (socketstudios.com) which showed up on my analytics as they for got to remove it. They also left the contolling javascript file on my server. I modified it to load images of dogs that have no idea what they are doing.

dutchbrit• 14 years ago

Classic way to "get them back" ;)

VuongN6• 14 years ago

Did you try to contact them? (By them, I mean the site owner. I feel like this is a solo operation)

On other notes, there's no stopping you from replacing the content of this area where you tell your own version of their description: (from site via Google Translate) "We have been working since 1999, incorporating technology and knowledge towards the design and communication, both institutional and business."

CWIZO• 14 years ago

I don't see why he should (if that is what you are implying), they didn't bother contacting him (apparently).

SocketStudios9• 14 years ago

Where would the fun be in that?

cantbecool• 14 years ago

What's an active URL for your personal photo site?

SocketStudios9• 14 years ago

It's not live yet.

crikli2• 14 years ago

Tangent: these kind of sites (the site that was stolen from), I'll call them "concept" sites, make me want to throatpunch a baby.

If you are seeking to demonstrate your jQuery/HTML5/CSS3 skillz then do it in a way that has some applicable context. Don't break so far from established usage conventions that users have to invest their the majority of their focus figuring out the site at the expense of examining the content.

After looking at several panels my understanding of what you do is still a guess. But I think you're a designer of some kind. If you are, the problem is that your site told me you care more about cool/flashy/pretty more than ease-of-use/user experience. As someone who engages designers on a weekly basis, that is not a positive differentiator.

SocketStudios9• 14 years ago

Thanks for that.

It was a 'concept' site largely for my own amusement (and to teach myself a little bit of js). I do have a private portfolio site that shows more of my work and has no javascript in it at all.

leephillips2• 14 years ago

While we're on the subject, I found the navigation to be obvious and intuitive, and the site to be beautifully designed. And the portfolio was lovely, too.

tomelders• 14 years ago

I liked it. I also browsed the entire portfolio which is something I rarely do. This site was so effortless, I went through every piece of work on there.

As someone who was a designer, has engaged hundreds of designers in the past, and works closely with designers every day, I say well done. I would definitely ask this designer to pitch if he wasn't full time at another agency. I don't think a designer could ask for much more from a portfolio website.

In conclusion: I don't think you know what you're talking about.

nhebb• 14 years ago

> these kind of sites [...] make me want to throatpunch a baby

That's the most viscerally disturbing thing I've ever read on HN. For as popular as HN has gotten, it's still one of the more civil discussion forums on the internet. I'm not a priss, but how about a bit of decorum, please?

Steuard3• 14 years ago

Using Firefox 12 with NoScript installed, your site is entirely unviewable. Even in its most permissive mode (which works for the vast majority of sites), NoScript does block cross-site scripts that it considers dangerous. On your site, I get this in my Error Console:

"[NoScript] Blocking cross-site Javascript served from http://flesler-plugins.googlecode.com/files/jquery.scrollTo-... with wrong type info application/empty, attachment; filename="jquery.scrollTo-1.4.2-min.js" and included by http://socketstudios.com/

I suspect that fixing the error mentioned there would make your site usable to more people (and more secure). But can I put in a plug for web design via progressive enhancement, rather than web design that just gives a blank grey page with a border and a few non-functional buttons if the scripts fail to load?

SocketStudios9• 14 years ago

Sorry, forgive my ignorance (I'm a designer not really a developer) but are you saying I should host all my JS myself?

As for the fall back to a working site should JS be disabled, or the scripts fail to load you're entirely right of course. There is a lot I could still do to the site, but it serves no real purpose and was largely just an experiment so isn't very high on my to-do list at the moment.

Sivart13• 14 years ago

I tried to read your comment with my eyes closed, but was unable to understand it. Please assist.

lightyrs• 14 years ago

Using noscript in 2012 is like watching TV with your eyes closed. You reap what you sow.

junto• 14 years ago

You should minify that JS and CSS.

bstar77• 14 years ago

I would have used a more offensive image, but that's just me.

TazeTSchnitzel3• 14 years ago

Think of the children.

Seriously. When I was younger I made a little social network thing for me and my schoolfriends. I didn't figure out how to properly deal with uploaded images (too much hassle), so I allowed you to simply hotlink a profile image. I hotlinked some funny picture at home, and...

At school it was pornography from the site owner intended to stop people hotlinking. I very quickly changed the image.

hswolff• 14 years ago

How does one forget to host their own JS?

VuongN6• 14 years ago

Copy & Paste any codes without understanding really burn people. Wasn't there a startup that got into trouble for doing the same thing? They later tried to play it off as "A/B" testing. Maybe this guy is A/B testing on how fast he can destroy his reputation by doing Copy & Paste of another site.

mryan• 14 years ago

Yes, Curebit got caught stealing/hotlinking assets from 37Signals.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/28/curebit-apologizes-for-copy...

pud• 14 years ago

Back in the late 90's when Cnet was really big, they embedded a video -- which was hosted on my server -- into one of their articles.

Without asking.

I found out because my hosting company called me and said I was about to get a huge bill. Bandwidth was super expensive back then and there was no YouTube for free video hosting.

I changed the file to a short clip of hardcore porn.

I know it was mean. But it was funny and somewhat satisfying.

m_st• 14 years ago

You should have introduced just a few frames of porn like they do in Fight Club :-) Anyway you made my day. Did Cnet pay the bill?

genu1• 14 years ago

bahahahahaha!! Do you have any stats?; number of views before the link was taken off?

Please tell me it was something stupid like a few hundred thousand views

huge grin

TomGullen• 14 years ago

I assume you had the rights to the porn? :)

calciphus• 14 years ago

It was the late 90s. Of course pud did.

miketucker• 14 years ago

beautiful site. pretty amazing you did it only 500 lines of js.

SocketStudios9• 14 years ago

haha, i'm not sure if that is sarcasm or not. i'm a designer that dabbles in code and that was my first attempt at JS. it works but i'm sure it is probably a disaster.

da_n• 14 years ago

Made me wonder what would happen if some rogue Google engineer decided to replace the CDN hosted jQuery on thousands of sites with script to auto-play a rick-roll.

TazeTSchnitzel3• 14 years ago

I've always wondered what would happen if a rogue MS employee slipped carefully-hidden malware into Windows Update. They could cause havoc.

leephillips2• 14 years ago

Wouldn't that be redundant?

micahgoulart• 14 years ago

What would be interesting is to detect the IP so that whenever the owners access the site, they see it normally, but others see it with the dog images. And put their email so visitors contact them telling them of the "vandalism", but when they access it, the site looks normal.

JohnnyFlash• 14 years ago

I was thinking exactly this!

The problem with doing something like this is that the site owner will probably take it down within 24 hours.

However... if the site owner cannot see it. Well well well.. could be up for days.

Typically the first person to view the page will be the owner. They want to check everything looks alright. Would be interesting to see the results of something like this.

VuongN6• 14 years ago

Let's see how long it takes before the offender finds out about this. I'm all for changing the company's description text to tell the full story as well.

Maybe do it in Spanish(?) rather than English.

SocketStudios9• 14 years ago

Can't do anything about the text. That's in the HTML which is on their server. I just have the JS file that controls the image loading.

TazeTSchnitzel3• 14 years ago

But you can do stuff with the text! You can manipulate the DOM, yes? And your script displays it in the first place.

VuongN6• 14 years ago

You have access to jquery AND your script loads in the head. I think $(document).ready(function () { $('[id*="details_"] .body').html('El propietario del sitio es robar el contenido literal de mi sitio: http://socketstudios.com. Si usted hace negocios con esta persona, usted va a tener un mal momento.'); })

gouranga• 14 years ago

Ha ha nice one. Justice served :)

PezCuckow• 14 years ago

Served this guy right!

okamiueru• 14 years ago

Did anyone take a screenshot of it?

rainkinz• 14 years ago

Anyone?

drcongo• 14 years ago

And it's gone. That cheered my day up hugely though, thanks.

tschellenbach• 14 years ago

What crap, just go to a company which does pay well. I'm a coder myself and my startup Fashiolista pays competitively. (Amsterdam though)

Khao2• 14 years ago

All I see is an "Index of /" page with a link to a folder called videoflow (now changed to 3333). Did the owners take it down?

Does anybody have a screenshot they can share?

lucian1900• 14 years ago

Yes. There used to be a page with a picture of a dog.

theSuda2• 14 years ago

Can someone dig up the page from browser cache and put up a screenshot for those who missed it?

theSuda2• 14 years ago

All I see on the site now is Index of/ page with a folder named 3333. What did I miss? :(

VuongN6• 14 years ago

I think he/she finally figured out what's going on!

rplnt• 14 years ago

And what happens when you steal images from cracked - http://www.cracked.com/blog/this-is-why-you-dont-steal-from-...

benrmatthews• 14 years ago

From the comments of that Cracked article:

"We had a similar problem at work, but we figured out the IP of the person doing the direct linking and dished out the images they expected to that IP, but the rest of the world saw an ad for our site."

One to consider for next time?

1SaltwaterC• 14 years ago

Once upon a time there was a dude that had the bright idea to hotlink the swf mediaplayer that I was hosting. Besides wasting my bandwidth, it also wasted my time for tracking all the referrals where he used the code. Long story short, he got a flash-based XSS in response. For the lulz.

Khao2• 14 years ago

I remember I had a website once where I had a little clock widget that I made in flash. I discovered that some of the traffic to my website was coming from myspace and found out that someone had used my widget on their myspace page. I changed the code in my widget to detect which url it was loaded from and if it wasn't on my website, it would simply crash and back then, flash didn't have the 30 second timeout when a script becomes unresponsive, you really had to kill the browser to exit.

talmand• 14 years ago

I had a similar thing once. A company ripped off one of our landing page designs, even down to copyrighted material, and kept one of the little flash widgets in the footer. I showed the boss that I could take advantage of that by whiting out their page or replacing their content with whatever message we wanted.I wanted rather mean-spirited and rude messaging since it would appear to come from them. The way I remember it I was doing this by injecting javascript into the page from the SWF.

The boss never let me do it, he decided to sic the lawyers on them instead.

wazzupflow• 14 years ago

Back in 2006 some guy ripped off my entire front-end for his ticket selling site in Europe and made the same mistake. I found out when going though my analytics. I blogged about it and actually made it to the front page of Digg (a big deal at the time):

"How NOT To Steal A Design": http://digg.com/news/story/How_NOT_To_Steal_A_Design

Ah memories :)

jakejake• 14 years ago

I was on digg a lot back then and I remember that story!

hellweaver666• 14 years ago

I used to work for a hosting company and one of our customers (a magician of all things) copied our template into his webspace to build his own website - we spotted it and gave him a chance since he was a customer and all. We checked up on him a few months later and he had just done the same thing but to a different hosting provider (while still hosting with us).

Why would a magician need a template that looked like a hosting company?

SocketStudios9• 14 years ago

Now this guy says he has never seen my site and any similarities are coincidental.

http://www.nerval.ch/

I don’t believe him but he wasn't stupid enough to leave any JS on my server so I can't do much about it.

mnicole• 14 years ago

Ah, I love when you can tell from someone's portfolio that they didn't design their own website. Sorry this keeps happening to you, it's so silly all these copycats come out of the woodwork after your site(s) are profiled on siteinspire/et al, and act like it was a shear coincidence.

simonbrown• 14 years ago

Reminds me of this:

http://mike.newsvine.com/_news/2007/03/27/633799-hacking-joh...

vivab0rg• 14 years ago

For what it's worth, here's all the data (JSON-formatted) about the domain, registrant, delegation, etc.:

api.nicalert.com.ar/domains/dsignio.com.ar

(shameless plug for my Nic.ar API)

What happens when you rip off a site but forget to host the JS yourself

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