March 29th, 2006

Filed under:
Internet, Photography, Sex
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A Better Reason to Block Nudie Shots on Flickr?

Last month, I criticized Flickr (perhaps a little too harshly) for their new policy which banned photos that show bits your bathing suit would cover. I recently recognized another, more compelling reason for them to block nude photography: other, high-traffic sites hot-linking to pornographic Flickr photos.

FlickrLicio.us (currently, as I’ll explain, safe for work ZOINKS! No longer safe for work!) is a group of sites featuring risque, nude and pornographic photos that originally posted to Flickr. They’ve been around since August, 2005. As zilliions of other website owners do, FlickrLicio.us is ‘hot-linking’ the photos from Flickr.

As I understand it, what’s at issue here is not so much the content but the bandwidth costs to Flickr. Clearly FlickrLicio.us was a popular site. Back in August, the site owner indicated as much:

Average data transferred per day: 6.46 gigabytes ..and that is just my side…with not a single babe pic being hosted by myself. I can only imagine how much it is for Flickr.

And that’s not counting the photos, which would be the lion’s share of the bandwidth. To put that in a little perspective, my humble, boob-free site will move about 30 GB for the entire month of May.

I agree with Stewart Butterfield, Flickr’s CEO, who pointed out that “it’s bad for Flickr and is an abuse of a system designed to help people get their photos out onto the rest of the web, and not lock them up in Flickr”.

So, Flickr’s blocking Flickrlicio.us. It’s no longer even a little licious. I support their doing so. The site must have cost Flickr considerable dough in terms of bandwidth. I guess in the long run they should publish some maximum for outgoing bandwidth to a third-party site. I imagine this problem is exclusive to porn, but you never know. For example, there are a lot of car enthusiasts out there…

Comments: One Response so far

Alex
May 13th, 2006
12:04 pm

Hi Darren,

You’re absolutely right about blocking the nudity content and this is the same for FOTKI also.

However, I’ve always been against outside activities in the workplace, therefore no personal computer use should be allowed. Yes, lunch time is one thing, however you almost have to display a sign at your work station to indicate you are on your free time, otherwise people talk. Do you know that workers spend an average of 56 minutes on the computer(not work related) . This does not include breaks/lunch. That’s almost a loss of 3 days per month of productivity in the North American workplace.

*I just finished a small business course with Robert Sanzalone and he mentioned that you were friends and to check your site.

Cheers!

Alex
Richmond, B.C.

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