Fusker

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Fusker is a type of

free hosted galleries) by systematically loading and downloading images following a pattern in the website's URL scheme. Fusking or fuskering is often used to extract private and nude photos without consent of the owner.[1]

Fusker software allows users to identify a sequence of images with a single pattern, for example: http://www.example.com/images/pic[1-16].jpg. This example would identify images pic1.jpg through pic16.jpg. When this pattern is given to a fusker website, the website would produce a page that displays all sixteen images in that range. Patterns can also contain lists of words, such as 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 entered the fusker, and can also be saved on the fusker web server so that other people may view it.

Fusker implementations

server-side
implementations of the Fusker technology are available on the web.

In addition, a fusker can also be implemented as

web site
.

With the sophistication of the modern

user agent. Web browser fusker applications essentially provide a scrapbooking interface within the web browser
which allows direct and customized access to the web image content. Some implementations allow you to save sets of fusker information as a collection file which can be electronically shared with other users of the fusker application without the need to store or transmit gigabytes of image data.

Criticism

Visitors to a fusker website frequently see copyrighted

hot-linking. Fuskers have been used to obtain media from nude photos hosted on private or password-protected album in Photobucket without the consent of the media owners.[2][3] Some of these images were then uploaded to the r/photobucketplunder Reddit community, which had 8000 subscribers before it was shutdown when Photobucket sent a DMCA request to the community's moderators.[4]

Companies that provide

free hosted galleries strongly dislike fuskers because they have the potential to cost them a lot of money in bandwidth bills, and because the only reason the free galleries are provided is to entice the user into clicking on a more profitable link, and those links are no longer displayed when a fusker is used. [citation needed
]

Some client-side fusker implementations blindly search domains for images based on common file names and directory structures. Some argue the numerous

user agent
headers are rewritten to an acceptable value, and more complex implementations can also emulate a web browser to the point of being able to click links and log into accounts.

Web browser implementations running within a legitimate browser offer a more legitimate access to the web content. Access through these applications is very similar to having saved a bookmark to the image. However, unlike a bookmark, these implementations may access thousands of images at the same time and may also overload servers not capable of servicing this amount of content.

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 botcher. Later it came to mean someone cheating (for example using company resources for personal benefit) or alternately doing shoddy work.[7]

History

The original fusker technology was created by Carthag Tuek,[8][9] who made the Perl CGI script as a work-alike of the UNIX/Linux cURL tool, specifically its URL-globbing functionality.

The idea has been continued by others and ported to other scripting languages.

See also

  • Web crawler, for software that systematically walks through websites
  • Web scraping, for extracting data from websites in general

References

  1. ^ "Photobucket shuts down Reddit's nude photo thieves". NBC News. Retrieved 2021-08-14.
  2. ^ Read, Max. "Ladies: 8,000 Creeps on Reddit Are Sharing the Nude Photos You Posted to Photobucket". Gawker Media. Archived from the original on 12 August 2012. Retrieved 16 August 2012.
  3. ^ Notopoulos, Katie. "The Dark Art Of "Fusking"". BuzzFeed. Retrieved 16 August 2012.
  4. ^ Gilbert, Jason (2012-08-16). "Photo Site Cracks Down On Peeping Toms". HuffPost. Retrieved 2021-08-14.
  5. ^ Limmer, Eric. "What a DDoS Attack Looks Like".
  6. ^ "How to block Fusker". 2005-03-13.
  7. ^ "Fusker". Ordbog over det Danske Sprog.
  8. ^ Sensible Erection Accessed August 1, 2015
  9. ^ Sensible Erection Accessed August 1, 2015
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