

What happens when you rip off a site but forget to host the JS yourself - chamtastic
http://www.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/
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pud
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.

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

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

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SocketStudios
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.

~~~
crikli
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.

~~~
SocketStudios
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.

~~~
Loque_k
Hmm, I kinda like it - and I tend to dislike sites that break conventions...
its simple enough that it works really well for me.

~~~
jthayne
Would be nice though if contact information and info about the company was
easier to get to. It is only available on the initial page or after scrolling
through the entire portfolio (at least I couldn't find it anywhere else). At
least if the site were designed to draw in business, that would be the case.
It definitely is not obvious.

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micahgoulart
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
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.

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

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

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

~~~
benrmatthews
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?

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hellweaver666
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?

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

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VuongN
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.

~~~
SocketStudios
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.

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

~~~
burriko
Indeed. You can basically change the site to whatever you want.

Changing the text in those boxes should be as simple as adding this to your
javascript file.

$('#details .body').html("This guy ripped off my site!")

~~~
SocketStudios
Right enough. Too late now though.

------
Khao
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
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.

------
da_n
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.

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

~~~
leephillips
Wouldn't that be redundant?

~~~
RobertKohr
Thank you for the chuckle.

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1SaltwaterC
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.

------
SocketStudios
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
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.

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okamiueru
Did anyone take a screenshot of it?

~~~
rainkinz
Anyone?

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vivab0rg
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)

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simonbrown
Reminds me of this:

[http://mike.newsvine.com/_news/2007/03/27/633799-hacking-
joh...](http://mike.newsvine.com/_news/2007/03/27/633799-hacking-john-mccain)

------
bstar77
I would have used a more offensive image, but that's just me.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
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.

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

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

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

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

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hswolff
How does one forget to host their own JS?

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

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/28/curebit-apologizes-for-
copy...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/28/curebit-apologizes-for-
copying-37signals/)

------
gouranga
Ha ha nice one. Justice served :)

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

~~~
SocketStudios
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.

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PezCuckow
Served this guy right!

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

