Fusker
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Fusker" can be a verb, a noun that describes a technology for the web, or a noun that describes the output web page of that technology. As a verb, "to fusker" is to identify a range of images to a fusker script that returns a web page that displays all of the images within the range.
For example, if you go to a fusker web page's form and enter the text http://www.example.com/images/pic[1-16].jpg, the fusker technology would produce a page that displays all sixteen images in that range, from http://www.example.com/images/pic1.jpg through http://www.example.com/images/pic16.jpg. It is also possible to use lists of words by writing http://www.example.com/images/{small,medium,big}.jpg which will produce three urls, each with one word from the bracketed list. The web page is then presented to the person who did the fusker, and can also be saved on the fusker web server so that other people may view it.
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[edit] Fusker implementations
In a sense, the fusker technology extracts images from their original locations and displays them in a new web page. Each image is thus extracted, or separated, from any surrounding information that the provider of the image may have wanted, like solicitations for services. Still, the images are not copied by the fusker technology; the new page that the fusker technology produces instructs the browser to retrieve each image from its host web server and display it in the context of the new page.
Many server-side implementations of the Fusker technology are available on the web.
[edit] Controversy
Visitors to a fusker website frequently see copyrighted pornographic images that have been separated from their intended context, which is usually a web-page-based advertisement for an adult site; the original page usually has a gallery of thumbnail images that are representative of the site's offerings. Understandably, any fusker that displays copyrighted images generally upsets the people who are hosting the images, because the fusker is displaying those images outside of the intended context. This is also known as hot-linking.
Some web site administrators have implemented technology of their own to prevent their images from being "fuskered". This is usually done by checking the referer field in the request header or requiring that the user logs in. [1]
The fusker technology includes a mechanism for reporting fuskers that contain illegal content.
Since fusker scripts simply output HTML containing images located on the original server, site administrators will notice their bandwidth usage increase, especially if it were a popular fusker site.
[edit] Etymology
"Fusker" is a Danish term which originally meant a person covertly doing work outside the official guilds. It came into Danish around 1700 from German pfuscher, meaning a dabbler, botcher, or charlatan. Later it came to mean someone cheating (for example using company resources for personal benefit) or alternately doing shoddy work. [2]
In English it nearly exclusively refers to the meaning described in this article.
[edit] History
The original fusker technology was created by Mikkel Carthag Tuek, who made the Perl CGI script as a work-alike of the UNIX/Linux cURL tool, specifically the "url-globbing" functionality of this. It was first publicized in late 2001 and was removed two years later, as the bandwidth usage became too unwieldy and the author preferred to avoid commercializing the site with advertisements. The original script also had a bug that would occasionally cause memory overflows. Several versions are available under a Perl license on Tuek's homepage.
The idea has been continued by others and ported to other scripting languages. There also exist JavaScript [3] (www.fusker.com.br) and Python [4] implementations.
