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Comment by furyofantares | Hacker News Reader

I run three word games, this stuff happens for all of them. It sucks but I would never do what they did, it's abusive to the people who just googled your game and ended up on the wrong site.

I've had teachers and students reach out to me to say they play my game in class every day together. And parents who play with their kids every day, and adult who text their results to each other every day.

It sucks if they end up doing it on an ad-ridden site when I built an experience that asks nothing of them. But it would suck even more to goatse them.

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Devil's advocate: OPs approach is a form of inoculation against the ad-powered Internet. The experience may not be pleasant, but drives the right message and quite memorably so.

100%, and not just as devil's advocate. Let the punishment fit the crime.

My sympathies are entirely on the side of the game's author. It's just an obscene image -- the "collateral damage" in this case is perfectly acceptable and imo fair because it damages the brands of the illegal hosters.

You’ll feel different about collateral damage when you have children of your own.

I already do.

Goatse is a right of passage and when my chuldren will inevitably stumble upon it one day I will be there to talk to them about it if they feel a need to. At the end of the day it's just a man stretching out his anus in bad lighting.

Yeah, I wouldn't allow my children unfettered access to the Internet and I certainly wouldn't be using an iPhone or tablet as a babysitter.

However as a gay nerd I'm not really interested in having children, so I'll just have to leave it up to the village.

I'm a little sympathetic to the author because I don't consider viewing the image all that damaging, but I'm not a fan of the general principle of hurting innocent bystanders in order to cause second-order pain to a third party.

I think you'd probably agree that, say, overwriting every file on the end user's computer with a text file complaining about how the iframe-wielding website steals content would be an unacceptable thing for the author to do. But the only difference would be the degree of suffering inflicted on the innocent bystander.

The difference is that I rate the amount of "hurt" to the viewers as essentially zero in this case, and I think the concern is misplaced pearl-clutching.

Agree for adults. Don't agree for young kids.

If you think this image is acceptable to show to young kids, are there any images you think are unacceptable to show them?

Images of violence.

Also the phrase "you think this image is acceptable to show to young kids" subtly alters my position in a disingenuous and (I think) intentional way. My position is not that you should "show young kids goatse" but that "a young kid seeing a flash of goatse isn't really a big deal". They might laugh, they might be a little grossed out, they might be curious why someone would do something so strange. I think the idea that they would be "harmed" or "traumatized" is pure adult projection.

Some apparent dichotomies are false, but "viewing/not viewing an image" is the real deal. (Do you want to make the case that a small exposure time represents a genuine midpoint between these extremes, to justify treating "a flash" of goatse as a special case, distinct from "viewing" it? If so, then right now I disagree, but would be interested in hearing your reasons why.)

I think there is a genuine change in meaning, coming from your use of the word "should":

>My position is not that you should "show young kids goatse

But that's not a word I used (or intended).

ETA: Agree on images of violence.

I don't have a problem with OP's approach and I think he should be free to put whatever he wants on the content-stealing sites, but he didn't have to make it sexual.

A very annoying, loud, visually busy animation would've sufficed. Baby shark at maximum volume, or a continuous fart sound, or maybe just a high pitched beep would also sufficiently scare away people.

By showing porn in a place that he knows minors and other protected groups will visit, they violate decency laws in a whole bunch of countries. They probably wouldn't if this was accidental (i.e. they sold their domain to a third party that turned it into a porn site) but in this case they admit this was very much intentional.

The fact that you think it is sexual says more about you than them.

If I intentionally expose myself publicly but it’s not sexually arousing for the recipient, does that mean it’s not sexual assault?

Correct.

For example a woman breast-feeding or a man peeing on a tree on the side of the road.

Ah yes, total real life equivalents to goatse

Who is showing porn here? OP or the company they would probably quite like to get shut down due to local censorship laws?

OOP took a series of deliberate actions for the image file to show up. I'd be very surprised if any reasonable court wouldn't put the blame on them.

They may have had a defence if this hotlink prevention was already there from the beginning, but this post explicitly admits that this was added intentionally in response, and that there were plenty of other options that could've been taken.

When it comes to many laws, intent matters a lot. You can make technical arguments about the nature of all networking all you want ("technically HTTP is a request/response system so if I just requested the server to delete all customer data I didn't hack it the system just foolishly accepted my request") but the real world doesn't really care about CORS and iframe policies as it does about not being exposed to some guys erect penis and stretched out anus.

agreed - it for sure would have been easier/cleaner/safer to just show a message that said "please play the official game on whatever.com"

This!!

Yeah this is actually basically what YouTube does when you embed a video and their settings don't allow embedding for that particular video. "Video unavailable - Watch on YouTube"

Thank you. I've been wondering why that feature exists for years now.

Yeah I think basically the reason is they want to show you the various ads before/after/during the video and they won't work in the embed view (just guessing)

It is not this developer's job to parent someone's kids. It is a parent's responsibility to make sure their child only gets access to the appropriate websites when they are young.

Counterpoint: it takes a village. You're naive if you think parents have and can keep full oversight / control over their offspring's internet usage. You can have their devices and your at home internet locked tight, but then they go to a library, they go to a friend's place, they go to school where they get a laptop or tablet and school internet access, or a friend's hotspot.

You can't protect your kids from the internet, you can only warn and educate them. I'm not saying to give them unlimited access from the get go, of course not. But I'm just saying you can't stop them either.

Exactly!

Look, RJ Reynolds was perfectly within their rights to market cigarettes to young children, and shops were within their rights to sell to young children. It’s not their job to parent children.

And if I want to open up a strip club across the street from the neighborhood public school, why should I be prevented by zoning laws? It’s not my responsibility to parent someone else's kids.

So before clicking on a word game in their browser, all parents should know about the business relationship, or lack thereof, between the underlying content provider and the website running in the top-level browser frame?

I want to emphasise, again, that we're talking about clicking on a word game here.

You could, however, easily block the game and render a message directing users to your actual site if you detect they are using the site in an iframe. What legitimate reason can there be for that?

I've had the same with my word game. People will report a bug and then I find out they are on some ad-ridden copycat. For my app it's reached multiple levels. One of the app thieves has embeded another app thief. https://imgur.com/a/0qW0y1r

The most frustrating thing for me is fucking Google. Their search results are so bad these days I can't get my game to the top even though thousands play it every day and link to it on social media. I'm at the top of Bing, DDG, Kagi. These sites run links to each other and Google's dumb algo loves it. Usually they don't use iFrame but proxy the whole request. Since using CloudFlare as my CDN a few of the app thieves have been defeated.

Yeah, my experience is also that they're mostly proxies and iframes are a minority. Some serve a cached version of the site (since like most of these, my sites are static - they do update to get the updated answer lists though, since I manually set the puzzles a bit in advance.)

Some of the sites that host their own cached copy even go out of the way to remove the credits and contact info from the page.

I think my strict privacy settings on Firefox are preventing the goatse, perhaps it needs a cookie or something

The abuser here is Google.

Definitely feels like a "report this website to google" button would be fantastic, if there was a way to automate/simplify such a thing for 1-3 clicks.

I hate to say the word, and especially because HN hates it, but this is effectively what DMCA notices are.

Its not copyright infringement to cause users to request the site and render in an iframe its closer to plugging yourself into someone else's electrical line

Google taking down a result from their site doesn't stop theft on a third-party's site.

Just to say, thanks for xordle. And for not serving obscenity on it.

+1 - this is a childish move and bad business imo.

I'd guess the author is pretty young.

It can't be bad "business" because they aren't making the game for money.

Definitely childish though.

> It can't be bad "business" because they aren't making the game for money.

It’s bad for their image and so for any business they may work on now or in the future.

Why would you want to do business with someone who prefers your content being used and monetized without your consent?

I don't think it's childish.

It's very crude, but satire often is and is one effective way of driving change in society around us.

OP is merely gripping onto the Old Internet

On the other hand, visitors to the freebooting websites will see other things being gripped

Life is a meaningless crawl towards the heat death of the universe. Childish behavior is the most appropriate attitude one can have towards most things.

I wish there was still more of a genuine whimsical side to the Internet or even businesses. The attention economy isn't the same.

I found a link on HN a while ago that shows you just that, it's a randomizer (like the old StumbleUpon) that sends you to random "old internet" webpages: https://wiby.me/surprise/

It sent me to a 1998 page about phrenology, the 'science' of determining someone's mental traits based on indentations in their skull: https://www.phrenology.org/index.html

Wiby is a great resource. My roll took me back to 'nam: https://jackrvn70.neocities.org/

I happen to run a directory of 'escapist/artistic' websites, if a second instance of self-promotion is permissible: https://wmw.thran.uk

I totally agree with you, and there are definitely more whimsical ways to go about it than goatse. Even if I personally can find whimsy in getting randomly goatse'd I'm not gonna say that someone who finds it really disturbing deserves what's coming to them just because they are insufficiently chill.

Anyone today familiar with goatse is likely to be well into their thirties at least.

If you were on forums in the aughts, it was unavoidable. I think every very online millennial knows what Goatse is. The youngest millennial is 27. Which begs the question: is Goatse what spreads Zoomers and millennials apart?

yes, everything done on the Internet must be deadly serious and professional AT ALL TIMES.

I'd guess you're pretty old.

Or very young. Young people never experienced what the Internet was like before the corporations destroyed it.

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