Adam y.

Internet Archive is basically a website back-upper. Content on the internet cannot last forever. A prime example is when web pages for news content gets deleted. Sometimes, your favorite article may be the victim and suddenly vanish.

Don't get me wrong when it is used for copyright infringment, copyright holders can simply ask to exclude the site.

While the site does permit removing logins if its a legitimate issue (pay per view), add/change post content, etc. there are countless times where websites ask guests to login to view stuff such as links or in the worst case, the entire page being behind a "login-wall".

These types of practice are just for advertising to spam people's emails. Not to mentioned that they cannot be archived with 3rd party sites like the internet archive since the archiver is a robot.

EDIT: actually, it isn't ad-related problem, the website actually got hacked. Visiting that website redirects to bad sites that can infect your PC, stay away until this is resolved (indicated by google search result).

Edit: website now fixed. All good.

If you are an anime fan, you're going to like this, its a website where users can submit their drawings online for others to view. Just like deviantart, their ads don't redirect users to malware. I especially love when users submit any anime characters that are 8-head proportion, as well as "pokemon anthropomorphism" ().

The only malicious ads I faced are the mobile site (touch.pixiv.net), thankfully, recently I have no issues so far.

EDIT: 11/27/2018 Please check the updates at the bottom.
OLD TITLE: Worst business decision ever since Adobe's move to creative cloud subscription only.
OLD review:
Photobucket, more like photof#cket.
What would you feel if you make a blog, a website or any other post, and then years later, found out that the (old) images were replaced with a message demanding you to upgrade your account to a paid subscription.
Images across the internet using Photobucket are now WREAKED, asking users to pay money to have them hosted (not a one-time fee, a periodic $400/year plan). It's a huge insult that they WOULD DECIDE to have this subscription at the most expensive of all their subscriptions. I am so disappointed to see this forum post of arts just got wiped out:
https://bbs.saraba1st.com/2b/thread-*******-2-1.html.

EDIT
Hotlinks aren't the only ones destroyed, viewing it directly, downloading or otherwise accessing it (even from their own site) on some images SOMETIMES NO LONGER WORKS (the "please upgrade your account" image instead of the image intended). That is a mess. This could be one of the biggest internet DISASTER ever. It's like they're censoring them for ransom. More like hosting images disabled, not just 3rd party.
Many people said they did this because their income are short due to users using adblockers on their site, you know why? Its because your site is heavily infested by ads. At least some news sites, deviantart and wikia step it up on keeping their ads clean. Nobody wants ads that have un-close-able, website access/usability-disabling, redirecting, opening in a new tab, scam hosting, fake close buttons, spawning a separate browser window as pop-ups (including pop-unders), banners/boxes WITHIN the website filling the screen, installing malware, noisy auto-plays that refuses to mute, any browsing-obstructive content placed on a webpage and any other what google describes them as "abusive experience". I've experienced mediafire and rayfile doing this cr@p with clicking on the (real) download button. Viewing it on mobile is EVEN WORSE, just run away.
This company turned to sh! T the way imageshack (better to be called imageshat) did. They had the nerve to turn their backs to say "no, it's no longer free" and prevent hosting images. What's worse is that they don't give enough warning to all its users that there is a change in terms of service.
The first time I saw this was on smwcentral, and it look god awful: http://smwc.me/*******
I hope this practice does not spread to multiple companies that host images like cancer, if any of them were to act this way, then there is no way to host your images permanently, like an avocado thats opened. Better to use google drive and link without hotlinking.
If you're an active user who wanted to fix your post, you have a FIELD DAY of fixing thousands of images across the internet you posted. If you're inactive, its gone forever. They could've make only images uploaded after that point be blocked, but they decided to screw it all.
EDIT: give a shout to Michel van Heijster for making a script that makes fixing your images WAY easier, download here: https://bitbucket.org/michelvh/photobucketscraper. Not sure if this is gunna work with if the image view on photobucket got replaced.
Thank god someone was smart enough to help others with this problem.
EDIT2: There is an browser add-on that circumvent this "hotlink protection" called "photobucket hotlink fix": https://github.com/Ryan-Myers/photobucket-embed-fix. What I want you to do is use that extension to enable viewing images, then download them ("save as"). It should download the actual image. Now reupload that image to another site (that does not do sh! T like photobucket did) and post a message stating that you backed up the image as intention to help visitors reading it.

11/27/2018 update: They have improved their business models and no longer block images anymore but rather watermarked them on outside sites. Now lets hope they continue to grow. The only sad problem now is due to the nature of how hotlink detection works, web archives cannot archive them as the hot inked content can read your URL. But you can download their originals.

While I liked the service, but I do not like their overly-cautious policy that they edit your review (often censoring certain phrases and even links by replacing things with "****") for their "Any privacy rights", as that is too inclusive since even mentioning a person's name that is known to the public gets revoked.

After seeing dropbox destroying download links, this seems okay at avoiding this.

I've realized it is not the site's fault for having malicious ads (which is why I gave a higher rating than before), as it is the ad network prone to attack. Thanks to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgs8h2pu-1I instead of clicking on the true download button (I said true because ads can be deceptive on the display) you would right-click on it instead and "save link as" or something similar (I'm using Google Chrome by the way). Just make sure your browser is up to date and so is your anti-malware software.

I would rather have anti-malware and avoid triggering ads than to use an ad-blocker because using ad-blockers could cause the site to do what photobucket have done.

I do dislike when ads do these following:
-Popups, and new tabs being opened.
-Do anything else besides closing when I wanted to close if it is a in-window box that prevents me from using the site (fake close buttons are examples of this)
-Redirects to any scam sites (tech support scams, congratulations), Amazon cards or just about any site.
-Drive-by downloads.

But I do dislike when sites be fallen because of the overuse of ad blockers AND that nobody is reporting them, causing attacks to be secret and makes this entire situation even worse.

If you are a professional anti-malware company that voluntarily help with websites be safe (I'm looking at you, malwarebytes), please at least weekly check this site' ad network. It's a popular site and that can be a big target for a large number of users.

I'm not into viewing porn content stuff, since that site is store-ish, but that site made hackershomepage.com look better. I know this site is outdated, since it was made during the early years the internet was born, but this website is still up right now.

-Site has HUGE BLOCKS OF TEXT without any "panel" or boxes to separate sections on a page. Combined with no linebreak in between each paragraph. This website reminds me of an a 5+ page essay assignment. And yes, the website is very tall due to this.

--Most of the font effects (colors, size, italic, bold, strike through, etc) don't "end" until the end of a "section". Meaning the HTML code of the site was poorly written, with the HTML tags that uses "</X>" (X means any html tag, such as "</b>" to end a bold font) placed FAR later on the sentence string, or even forgotten.

-Too many hyperlinks: many professional website uses a "tab" system to minimize similar items hide in one "show/hide" button. That site does not know how to do that.

--Not only that, the whole site is a HYPERLINK MAZE. Look, if you go to any other site, they organize content in each section. This website, anything goes, without even a navigation bar that shows a "directory" of how you got there. It's easy to get loss in this website. The URL doesn't help at all, since most of the time, they rather use "ID number" rather than "parent/child/specificwebpagename".

-No title of the website. It just barges you with information without telling what this website is other than a warning its for 18+.

-Overuse of font colors. Just look at the main page.
-Images have GODAWFUL resolution with opaque solid color backgrounds. Is that made using Microsoft paint? There are some odd grey color on some images involving text being resized, probably due to poorly edited images.
--Like hackershomepage, it uses OPAQUE copyright watermarks. You could at least use google drive's apps such as google slides, make the object transparent, then print-screen that. Even the watermarks have distorted text since they RESIZED the image resolution (pixel loss). Same goes for the ads (but without the watermark)

Overall the whole website is painful for someone (who is a pr0nographic) to use. Have the author of the website ever visited another website? The quote "Less is more" pretty much say what this site should've done.

Just read this article: https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-conducted-invasive-surveillance-operation-against-homebrew-hacker-*******/

On top of the attack against abandonwares, fan games, and even homebrew people out there, it was revealed they have went from anti-piracy to anti-privacy what it was revealed that leakers have shown that Nintendo were going intrusive on their surveillance against an individual in 2013. They're on the very border of becoming flightsimlabs (2018 when they pulled the stunt on acting like vigilantes of a password-stealing tool), and the move that Take2 and 2K sent goons to someone's house relating to that borderlands 3 incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip2nm503Tm0

That Smash melee is really the straw that broke the camel's back, I would say thank you to the leakers for revealing Nintendo's dark secrets. The secret formula that is filled with poison about the company itself is now exposed.

They've decided to bend the knee to the RIAA to allow them to take down ANY videos, regardless if fair use or not, or even if it had any copyrighted materials on there, without due process and in a way that is considered shadow banning.

Looks like this site has no purpose then, going the very route that tumblr went when they've banned NSFW using a broken algorithm.

If you ignore all the good songs made or published by this person, you'll find something disturbing about this person. He is one of the people that wanted the US to have draconican copyright laws much like the MPA (previously the MPAA) and the RIAA. He's an arrogant temperament man- oops I mean kid (because he acts like a spoiled kid, despite his age is 72! He was born in 1947 for f*cks sake! So he hasn't man up throughout 72 years) over even small uses of copyrighted works. Attacking fair uses of works and acting babyish over that he "owns" everything he makes even ones that were made before he made it.

Just look at this: https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=don+henley and you'll see he is attacking artists, people using words that is used in the common language BEFORE any of his lyrics were created

The most recent article (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/*******/*******612/midst-pandemic-widespread-unrest-senate-republicans-think-time-to-use-copyright-to-make-richest-musicians-richer.shtml as of now) made this excuse:

[Not because I don't like parodies or satires of my work. But it's simply a violation of U.S. copyright law.]

Which means he wanted to nuke stuff on the internet for no other reason just to be a copyright police without any legitimate reason.

Nobody wishing to create a website should accept a zero-tolerance DMCA policy by a host that would expect websites to be perfect at preventing copyright infringement and being expected to voluntary to remove them without a DMCA notice. Any website that allows posting can be abused for piracy, and owners cannot monitor all files at once to make sure they are compliant with the law (especially if there are tons of users). A tolerance this low means this company deserves to go bankrupt or change their policy for forcing web owners to do something impossible.

According to this techdirt article "Adland Shuts Down After Web Host Complies With Bull$h! T DMCA Notice", Adland had to shut down due to a response of this server host when receiving a DMCA notice from Bridgestone Tires. Instead of locking up the site and unlocking once the DMCA notices are followed, they would rather perma-ban this site off their network, stating they must migrate to a new server within 24 hours. This is just *ONE* DMCA notice, and this host is sensitive to this.

Screw this "self-copyright-enforcement" on how they deal this "repeat-infringer policy"- oh wait, it isn't a repeat policy, its a zero-tolerance.

This is like instead of getting 3 copyright strikes on youtube to get you banned, just getting ONE now gets you banned.

Just to warn you, not all DMCA notices are true, as they can be sent in error, in an attempt to censor, and rarely, to extort people.

This is one of the "above the law" "voluntary" enforcement actions by companies thinking that liability and pressure should be increased in their own hands:
-Google banning "kodi" from the search term because it was "associated with piracy". Kodi, itself is completely legal. Funny that so far to now, Youtube have tons of videos on getting Kodi addons that facilitate piracy, and not many are taken down by youtube.
-ProFreeHost bans any and all "torrent" files even when they are not infringing copyright.

These companies are overly-chilled (chilling effect).

Imagine in real life you're going to a store. Suddenly you get kicked out because you have these that are prohibited:
-Wearing clothing that have pockets.
-Bags, including purse and backpacks.
Because those are used to conceal goods for shoplifting. You are also not allowed to walk any faster than 1 MPH (1.47 FT/SEC)

This is what disabling right-click AND disabling pressing (not rolling) the scroll wheel feels like. Seriously, pressing the scroll wheel have no "copying" function whatsoever, all it does is allow continuous scrolling and that's it. The only other use of a scroll wheel is to open a link in a new tab.

This is one of the sites that are overzealous and arrogant butthurt of unauthorized use. This puts gmarket.co.kr to shame because at least that site lets you use continuous scrolling, and only have the DRM to restrict rightclick applies to the items page and not anywhere else.

-This organization is a draconian copyright supporter: SOPA supporter, Destroying abandonware, and tries to protest many of the important exemptions of the DMCA about circumventing DRM.

-Supporter of Microtransactions. Not only they are trying to justify loot boxes in video games to not be government-regulated, according to a torrentfreak article: https://torrentfreak.com/esa-reports-pirate-bay-rom-sites-and-cheaters-to-the-us-govt-*******/ they have the UTTER NERVE to enforce against cheating to bypass microtransactions, (different from how EPIC and T2's reasoning to sue cheaters, since that is for multiplayer):

"In this section of its report, the ESA highlights threats to "free-to-play" games that generate revenue from micro-transactions, advertising, and subscriptions. Unauthorized third-party private' servers allow users to play such games, bypassing the original revenue model and stopping publishers from monetizing their content."

Microtransactions in video games are often designed to exploit players and make the game worse on purpose and selling off the in-game items to improve the experience in the process. See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4 they rely on "creating a problem and selling the solution", For example, a "free-to-wait" mechanic in mobile games (forcing you to wait or pay up), grind walls in $60 games (make you do repetitive tedious tasks like killing enemies if you choose not to pay up). Its like going to a grocery store, to find that the floors are dirty, items on shelves not organized, on purpose and to have those fixed, you, the consumer have to pay extra.

If games are too expensive, they should've sell the game at a higher base price and not rely on "player's choice" on secondary purchases. These game companies rely on, "whales" people willing to spend a lot of money on a game. There are people out there with disabilities, addics and other issues that makes them susceptible to such business practices. News articles broke out about kids spending their parent's bank accounts and others going broke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S-DGTBZU14.

This sounds frighting enough, until news broke out around the beginning of August 2019 that they doxxed 2000s of people's personal information at the E3, including home addresses, phone numbers, and full names out into the public that is the internet. It's as if they are trying to compete with Facebook, Equfax, and Capitol One to see who is the worse in trying to protect individual's information. Many of these 2000s are game journalists and even ones who make youtube videos criticizing the game industry.

You know that such information shouldn't be out in the public, because there are malicious people who disagree with others, and would rather stalk and attack them physically. They've been swatting, and having your home address is enough for them to target you. Therefore, the ESA's mishandling of this put many people who signed into the E3 in danger.

This company, much like:
-When reddit deleting forms labeled "piracy" when the vast majority is talking ABOUT piracy (which that alone is legal) on the subreddit.
-When Google banning the term "kodi" on their search query under the excuse it is associated with piracy, despite that tool being completely legal.

There are reasons why going beyond what is legally required is a bad idea, voluntarily enforcements against legal things is a terrible measure. "Oh just in case we get yelled at by copyright holders", nope, just nope. This company is too afraid to step ANYWHERE closer to the boundaries of the law and resort to banning users who even submits an open source software that aids torrent download (its legal if you download public domain works or works that aren't under copyright).

This behavior is what happened to Bram Cohen on Libtorrent: https://torrentfreak.com/hosting-company-suspends-account-over-open-source-bittorrent-software-*******/. Its better to go to a hosting site that does not enforce its own rules more than legally-required as a "preventive measure" to avoid legal trouble.

Just stay away from this site, with the voluntary enforcements like this, I can imagine if they are too open to attack stuff and users in the name of "more-than-legally-required copyright enforcement".

There is no such things as sucessful automated filters. False positives and negatives are bound to happen. Robots only know what they programmed to do, they don't understand context, and are not self-aware.

You probably have herd about the European Union's article 13 that forces major websites to employ an automated copyright filter to prevent people from uploading infringing material to websites. Youtube have done a similar thing before this happened but merely notifies copyright holders instead of proactively taking down what's potentially legal content. And yes automated takedown themselves also exist, ToppleTrack went haywire due to a bug.

While telling if something is copyright infringement is easier for most cases, due to the fact that it compares with a databases that copyright holders are welcomed to prohibit unauthorized distributions there (via matching-based data hashes), it is much harder to try to tell if something is pornographic or not, due to a sheer number of ways to represent inappropriate stuff and this isn't matching base, so it doesn't compare with anything.

The result: Tumblr ends up flagging TONS of posts that have nothing to do with "Adult Content", images of dragons, dogs, and even abstract art with no "characters" in it (here: http://dailyrothko.tumblr.com/post/*******506/not-to-pile-on-here-but-this-doesnt-look-exactly) ends up in the wrong. You really can't trust robo-police here.

Is it enough that most websites require you to be at a certain age to even create an account. Why is it that most places, like apple's (the same company who made proprietary closed-platform in which they can decide what app can run on their devices) app store forbid porn altogether (regardless of the age of the viewer). This is overzealous censorship. We all know that parents are smart enough to prevent their kids from seeing such stuff on the Internet, there are parental controls at almost every services and systems (game consoles, google's safesearch, etc.).

Tumblr you should've done these things:
-Do something similar to how art sites censor for minors. No joke, if you are going to make changes to your policy, at least you would've done is to make existing post compatible with future changes. Something like a checkbox to notify the system to only display works towards older audiences.
-You should've made a no-porn policy when you were creating the website. But you decided to welcome them and then brake your promise.

Congratulations: you've lost a lot of your users. And also, screw apple, companies and other services who pressured tumblr to a censorship blogging place. It's another photobucket incident that images are disappearing (ESPICALLY for inactive users, which can be deleted forever).

In 2011-12, along with the MPAA, TV companies, some cable companies (like Comcast), its the team who supported the controversial SOPA/PIPA bill. Along with supporting perfect 10 against the fight with giganews (and perfect 10 lost tremendously), this company HATES liability limitations. It wants to be the person who sues anyone who manufactures knifes just because people can use them to murder others.

If that is not enough, they have a long history of assuming people are pirates, from assuming that if you get pop-ups and viruses (malware), its piracy: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/02/riaa-parents-pop-ups-viruses-piracy. Soo, is news sites piracy then? Because they have such crap on their sites. How about trying to force radio makers to have DRM on them: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2005/09/riaa-trying-copy-protect-radio. To suing many families. This one is a huge copyright troll. In simple terms, they are one of the copyright maximalist who is afraid of anything that is innovation and thinks that its innovations for pirates.

... Thought it would be a good idea to extend the attacks towards people that don't pirate at all.

"How do I stop this infection? How about use a nuclear bomb to kill everything in sight?"

They are NOTORIOUS for trying to create a handful of new copyright enforcement tools (more specifically, laws, crappy DRM) which ALL of them have dangerous side effects that nobody ever wants besides any copyright maximalist who think its a good idea to add more restrictions, enforcement, and even monitoring to users. From annoying FBI warning screens (in this modern age, you cannot skip) to requiring certain devices they don't own to have DRM on it (such as television flags), this organization has it all:

*SOPA (and its clones, including PIPA) supporter. In a nutshell, they wanted to make sites punished more easily just because it has infringing content, rather than a notification before a takedown if the site owner doesn't obey when it is in fact infringement. This goes without saying that safe harbor is bypassed should this bill passed into law. When I mean sites being punished, I mean that any copyright holder can simply send a notification to payment network providers, advertising services and any other groups to stop supporting the site that is flagged for infringement, WITHOUT ANY PROOF. This comes before the victim of the attack have to proof that they're not supporting piracy. So the damage to the site is already done. Along with Viacom (yes, another copyright maximalist who f*cked youtube along with false takedown to any reviewers like they are being above the copyright law) and others who previously try to pass the COICA bill, they have the NERVE to try again on a similar law enforcement tools all over again. If you fail to succeed, DON'T try try again. They wait no time to attack. Treating online service providers or anything else that is abusable for piracy like slaves is egregious.

-Of course, members of the MPAA was Universal Pictures and Walt Disney Company, who got into a fight with sony (Not sony pictures, just sony) for releasing a video tape titled "Betamax" in 1984. Find more on "Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc." and thank god that Sony didn't lose the battle. They are afraid that if a tool that is often used for piracy, they will try to take it down for liability just because it enabled them to do so. This is an example they trying to be against fair use.

They're slogan "don't talk and don't record" (can't remember exactly) pretty much tells me that the first two words is censorship, for the Internet under the name of copyright enforcement. This organization represents the crumbling, corrupted, corrosive form of copyright. They hated safe harbors the same way they hated piracy, up to where people would like to use content in creative ways that doesn't harm a copyright holder's revenue. This is the complete opposite of what copyright intended to do: "To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes." More like "To promote dictatorship, monopoly, and relying on extremism by combating freedom of speech".

This company is a stealth police car, equipped with X-ray cameras, to see anyone what they are doing if they think it is suspicious. Your house is basically made out of glass, this is how they can see what are you doing.

Im okay if DRM would do something creative (like the video game earthbound that increases the enemy spawn rate, and other things), and I understand that piracy is harmful, but this vigilante-like malware DRM like this is like having excessive surveillance in private places. Anti-piracy, more like anti-privacy. Even if the DRM was perfect, no consumer would like to have a potentially abusive copyright enforcement on their machines in a matter similar to leemena's fangame "sonic gather battle", and the fact that DRM can be exploited by actual malware writers the way it happened with Sony BMG rootkit.

It was discovered that the DRM have a google chrome password dumping tool named "test. Exe" that steal passwords should the software's serial number check fails (use to verify if the user is a pirate or not). Should it flags that the user is a pirate, it sends the password information to this company just for investigation of the user.

This is not a fake exe made by vigilante 3rd parties who support copyright-maximal-ism enforcement, this is an OFFICIAL COMPANY who place this digital rights malware on their software, for ALL downloaders regardless if the user was a pirate or not. Guess what, you can make excuses that it only runs if the user is in fact a pirate, but it is UNACCEPTABLE the fact that is INCLUDING this in the software that users download.

As time goes on, we keep seeing more and more disgusting enforcement over copyright going out of their way against users legally using content. These sh! Theads want even more rights than copyright can take a hold on the use of a product, from copying a content under fair use, to preventing use in unauthorized countries (example: new zeeland crappy companies like MediaWorks, Spark, Sky Network Television, and TVNZ are enforcing this copyright region licensing against VPNs), to prevent modification, tampering, editing and even repairing a content, and now trying to make it mandatory for sites to use automated filtering system a similar way how youtube takes down videos. Now we're in an age where anyone who dare violates any of these obnoxious, stupid, anti-consumer, f**ked up, vomiting, co*ksu***ng, bullsh! T policies restrictions could be legally punished? It's like they're trying to be above the copyright law than actually following how copyright actually works.

EDIT of June 10,2018:

On JUNE 4,2018 they've done it again. This time they are even more similar to how Sony used malware: using deceptive file names to try to look like legitimate software to try to "trick pirates" into thinking not to delete that file. The software in question: cmdhost. Exe is equivalent to Sony's "Plug and Play Device Manager", just for "authentication" purposes. It was on Torrentfreak article about flightsimlabs: https://torrentfreak.com/flight-sim-company-threatens-reddit-mods-over-libellous-drm-posts-*******/. The file itself isn't a virus or malware, rather a "dummy" file to be used by an exe to do things that malware would, called "system hollowing": https://youtu.be/v6gu8HCMrTo?t=196.

Whats worse, is the company itself. They're censoring their forums to hide what they were caught doing and now trying to bully outside sites like reddit to "take down these DRM criticisms or we will sue you for libel" as an attempt to prevent anyone from knowing about their own tactic.

F*cking. Distasteful. If I criticize a store for installing HIDDEN cameras IN THE TOILET, I should not be under the influence of the store policy saying "you cannot disclose our security system".

We're already in the time where the EU is now planning to have the worst draconian copyright enforcement in the planet of mankind. Demanding mandatory content ID to be on all internet platforms, removing safe harbors, pretty much SOPA 2.0.

According to a Wikipedia Article regarding the AACS Key controversy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy

They removed the link to "Digg-it" on their blog because:

"Until the Digg community shows as much fervor in attacking intellectual piracy as attacking the companies that are legitimately defending their property, well, we do not want to be promoting the site by using the "Digg It" feature."

Guess what, it isn't a crime to have people posting "infringing" decryption keys on website when the webowner AT LEAST tried to remove such content. Not to mention, how is content (which is often digital content such as software) on a DVD used as piracy even related to this company who specializes manufacturing? WHAT THE HECK?!?

Also, this company is a SOPA supporter, so this company is not worth supporting then. F#ck off.