Re: 'Active Imaging Webcast'

On Thu, Oct 22, 1998 at 03:25:20PM +1000, Kevin Littlejohn wrote:

> I've just run across something interesting - a site called
> 'www.netoptions.com', who appear to be selling hosting services to
> porno sites. Amongst the services they offer is video streaming.
> This seems to be done in an interesting way - the request that
> triggers the video looks like a normal web request, and the
> resulting stream seems to come back as a normal file - with the
> content-type set as a multipart file, each part being a jpg in it's
> own right.

This is a Netscape thing. No other browsers I'm aware of support this
(at least, I've only even managed to get Netscape to display these
things).

I think there are a couple of sites doing similar things.

> It appears if you sit on one of these, it just keeps tacking new
> jpg's into the stream - thus creating one ultra-huge file, size
> limited only by boredom threshold of viewer.

Or the strength or their wrists.

> The only 'real' solution I can think of is, instead of dumping
> files to disk if they go over a certain size, start dropping the
> front of the file, to keep it at a reasonably fixed size.

The problem with this, is most file systems only allow you to
truncate the end of a file - no the beginning, so you would have to
copy it periodically.

> I doubt this will work very effectively though - especially where
> there's a speed differential between client-proxy and proxy-server.
>
> Anyone got any other ideas?

If file size is unknown and the file length (cached to date) is over
a certain threshold, then just drop the connection.

Too harsh?

-cw
Received on Tue Jul 29 2003 - 13:15:54 MDT