Director of Technology's report, April & May 2004

Hi Francis,

You wouldn't want to clarify the linking policy would you?

Under what conditions can non-members follow links to rhizome articles
or art base entries?

thx


On Jun 1, 2004, at 2:23 PM, Francis Hwang wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Here are some of the interesting things that happened (tech-wise) in
> Rhizome-land:
>
> 1. Server upgrade
> This is the big one: We moved Rhizome to bigger, faster, angrier
> machines, and the results have been pretty dramatic. If you've been
> wondering why everything is so peppy all of a sudden, well, that's
> why.
>
> 2. Commissions voting
> Rachel announced the various winners at
> http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread205&text%275 . In the next
> month or so I'll write a more techie/community-designy debriefing of
> our voting process, complete with lots of stats.
>
> 3. Hiring
> FYI, I ended up hiring David Galbraith (
> http://rhizome.org/member.rhiz?user_id20482 ) as my main techie
> consultant. David's a sound-artist/programmer, and for all his hard
> work he now has the privilege and honor of hanging out with me in our
> tiny office and hear me obsess about object-oriented programming.
>
> F.

===
<twhid>http://www.mteww.com</twhid>
===

Hey T.,

Our linking policy is a work in progress–I don't know if I could
properly call it a "policy", even. I can describe our intent and our
implementation for you, though much of this is subject to change.

As Curt described at
http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread229&text%382#25382 , the
intent is that if somebody at another web site links to a page deep
inside Rhizome, they should be able to see the first page without being
logged in, but further exploration will require registration.

The implementation uses the referer field in a web request, which can
see if you came from another site. So if you get linked to a Rhizome
text from, say, http://mteww.com/, the membership system reads the
referral field and sees that you came from another site, and lets you
in. But any further clicks will ask you to login.

This has no effect on RSS, or links in email. The RSS file we have now,
/netartnews.rss, isn't password-protected anyway, and it's unlikely
that we'll publish any protected RSS in the future. And it's my
understanding that clicking on a link in an email won't send a referer
value, meaning that you'll be asked to login in the first click.

Curt noted that it's possible to hack this. There are some ways to
tighten and restrict, but we don't actively pursue them, largely
because the solutions cause more harm than good, and there are almost
no cases of serious infringement. In general, we want to err on the
side of too little control. And for the rest, we depend on the good
intentions of the rest of the web, which is sort of how the internet
works.

Francis


On Jun 1, 2004, at 3:02 PM, t.whid wrote:

> Hi Francis,
>
> You wouldn't want to clarify the linking policy would you?
>
> Under what conditions can non-members follow links to rhizome articles
> or art base entries?
>
> thx

Hi Francis,

Thanks for clarifying this.

It was as I guessed.



On Jun 3, 2004, at 5:31 PM, Francis Hwang wrote:

> Hey T.,
>
> And it's my understanding that clicking on a link in an email won't
> send a referer value, meaning that you'll be asked to login in the
> first click.

as with a news reader…


> On Jun 1, 2004, at 3:02 PM, t.whid wrote:
>
>> Hi Francis,
>>
>> You wouldn't want to clarify the linking policy would you?
>>
>> Under what conditions can non-members follow links to rhizome
>> articles or art base entries?
>>
>> thx
>
>
>
>

===
<twhid>http://www.mteww.com</twhid>
===