I stumbled across this mini signal mirror at the TOPS site. Not a bad option for on-body carry where you might not otherwise have a dedicated signal mirror. As long as the chrome polishing is done well, it looks like it may be workable. I'd put a clear plastic protector on it, like the kind you put on PDA screens.

(image link removed 'cuz it was causing some problems; sorry!)

Looks like an unfriendly company.

Well, I guess that's the last time I use TOPS knives for anything.

The idea that a hotlink is theft is ludicrous. It's an image for pete's sake. You don't market the image, you market the item in the image. If you are selling artwork on the internet, then you'd have other security provisions making it difficult for anyone to download, let alone hotlink to.

Actually, the problem is you are subjecting their servers to excess usage which costs money via bandwidth charges. They pay $X.XX for per YYY hits. Every time the picture you hot linked is viewed in this thread their server gets hit. They have to pay for that hit even though they don't have a customer browsing their store-server. It's not about the image, it's about the costs of bandwidth.

-Blast

Blast nailed it. Chances are they've had a problem with this in the past if they went to the trouble to set up the system that detects hotlinking. If you don't want to give them your business over this, that's fine. But I bet if someone used your server to show a picture for their ebay auction to 10,000 viewers, you might feel a bit more sympathy...

Just the link to the item on their site is best; you still get to see it if you want, and they get hits/ad revenue for their site.

Damned my confusion. I figured the hotlink was doing just like what airballard suggests is best. When I click the link, am I not going to their website viewing an item they are selling?

Something here don't make no sense. Why would anyone not want me to go to their website and view what they are selling just because I am hotlinking to it? That seems counterproductive to me.

I would say Blast's response to my email might make better sense. If they are getting the hit and all I see is just an image (not the whole site as is apparently the case in this instance), then that wouldn't be fair. I didn't figure on them taking a bandwidth hit on just looking at an image, but that seems a legitimate concern, and not at all what happened on this link. For the hotlink posted on this thread, it seems to me they are getting free advertising on the ETS forum, and they are going to complain about that???

Gee, it's a free ad on someone else's site. Their business model is short-sided. If it costs them a hit on their server, isn't that why they're online - to sell product?? TOPS is bottoms to me.

By blocking the hotlink and posting a link to their full site instead they get even better advertising.

Edit:
The actual link is not blocked, it works just fine.
It was the image that was blocked.
They want you to visit their site.
(not a bad site either)
So all they are doing is posting a statement with their website address on it.
It does seem a bit counter productive not to put a working link onto the image link unto it instead of just an image telling you to visit them.

Now I will go back and look at their mini-mirrors to see what the actual post is about.

Edit 2:
Nice site with some interesting stuff.
Not the kind of stuff I am likely to buy, but still interesting stuff.

About the mirrors.
I wonder if they are large enough to be effective.
I have a couple of the star flash and a couple of the small glass ones hiding in different packs and I wonder if even they are really big enough.

So I would not likely add a piece of jewelry as a mirror, but if you wear that kind of stuff or need more stuff on your keychain I say go for it.
I bet they would make nice zipper pulls

I'm actually quite impressed by their technical know how. Having done business with Tops in the past I'd do it again just for the sense that if they handle their security this tight they probably handle my credit card info just as well.

Well, they aren't that bright. It isn't a security link, it is what you get when you click the photo of said mirror on this page.

So in their rush to be pissy, they have now cut their own nose to spite their own face!

Not interested in their crap anyway.

If they were smart, they'd replace the hotlink to the image with a link to their main website. Not a link to this "Oh no, you shouldn't have done that!" message. They have a right to protect their bandwidth usage. But doing it in this manner is a turn-off to potential customers. Myself included. Just turn hotlinks into links to the main website, it's very easy to do.

Well it looks like they fixed the link. The image in the OP's post now shows the proper product.

Well I guess I spoke too soon, the image is back to the original...

You do realize this probably means someone at tops that should be working is surfing the ETS site instead.....

The warning message costs them bandwidth too. Judging from the comments here, it costs them customers too.

They should embed their website link into the picture and write off the excess bandwidth to advertising.

If I were a retailer selling survival gear, I would be delighted to have a product linked to this forum by a happy customer. If I was the owner of Tops, I would be mortified by what is happening on this thread.

This is an example of Penny Wise, Pound Foolish.

Wow, sorry everyone; I didn't realize the hotlink would be a problem, I just wanted to showcase what I thought was an interesting idea. I've removed the hotlink to the image, but it showed up just fine the whole time on my browser.

Anywho, like many gear items that fit in a pocket or on your neck this mirror wouldn't be my first choice if I had to choose just one, but if it works decently and is always on my person then I think it would be OK. I put one of the Adventure Medical Kits signal mirrors in my wallet and it was way too thick.

Oh, I understand the too thick part about the mirrors quite well.
The ones I have are definitely pack carry items, not wallet or pocket.
I even hesitate about the glass ones when I weigh them against the Star Flash ones just because of the weight.

I would likely get two of these tag ones and see if I could signal between me and somebody else from a decent distance away.
If it works great, if not then why carry it.
Either way you are not out much by checking them out, and if they work you have a small piece of gear.

I was going to jump in here and give my great speech about copyrighted images. But then I decided it wasn't worth the trouble. Since I am involved with TOPS, half of you would think that is my reasoning and not that I am a professional photographer. It is also common sense that some of you will love the TOPS products and some will not. My making a post in defense of them isn't going to change a thing. I will say that if you discount a companies product just because you can't an image off of their site, I'm not going to worry about it.
For those who are interested, the dog tag signal mirror is a nifty little item. I wish I could take credit for it but I didn't have a thing to do with it. A larger mirror will work better but for it's size it will surprise you. The idea is to always have one with you and if it is around your neck the chances of you leaving it behind are slim. The only testing I have done was at about 100 yds. I wanted to take a photo of it shining and at that distance, it totally faked out the auto function on my camera. (I should have known better than to shoot anything on auto)

Hi Terrill, and thanks for the update.

I wasn't really bothered by it. How you do things is up to you. What happened here was a fair use of the image by one of us got blocked because of other people who have abused access to your images.


I am still wondering a bit why you guys do not Put a link to Your pages on the image which you do post (your logo) that warns about the blocked image being a hot link?

After reading your company's answer to Big Daddy TX I think I see a possible reason in that you don't want a link on a cheap hijacker's page at all.
If that is a correct guess then you can hardly be blamed for that. I would likely do just the same now that the problem with Discounters has been explained and I have thought about it for a moment.

As noted, you didn't block the actual link to your page, just the image.

Sheesh, good thing for you I am a nice guy, you left a great opening there.
See you at PWYP in April
Stu

Sorry; I did a lousy job explaining what I was trying to say. Hotlinking is putting a tag into a web page (like the OP did) that causes an image to be displayed in your browser. The link in "hotlinking" is telling the website where to pull the image file from. In this case, it is not coming from the ETS webservers, nor the computer of the OP. It was coming directly from the tops website. Thus my comment on bandwidth. Also valid is the point in the email that tops sent on the matter, which is their image being used to bait-and-switch a knockoff product elsewhere.

Linking to their site, that is putting text or an image that links back to them, is quite OK and they like that stuff. When someone hotlinks an image, hosted on their server, on a website not under their control, they cannot create or change any clickable link to go to their site, or anywhere else. All they have the power to do is change the image (which is still being called by the outside website) to inform viewers that the image being posted is coming from their site. The admonishment is directed at the poster/webmaster that has inappropriately hotlinked their image; not at the viewer.

Sorry for the confusion, tech-speak, and long-windedness. I'm just trying to clarify the matter from an uninterested third-party perspective. And I'm still not sure if I've done it well...

I didn’t get to see what the anti-hotlinking image actually was, so if that image was unfriendly, I do not know. However, I can attest to the kind of problems that inline linking (hotlinking) can create. Feel free to read this Wikipedia article on the subject for some basics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking.

Companies do not like their images to be linked directly from third-party websites for the reasons listed here already. TOPS Knives explained the issue of misrepresentation, using their web site image to advertise a cheap knock-off. I can assure you as the technical administrator for several forum-based websites that this is a much more common occurrence than you may realize. No offense to the Chinese, but I swear it seems like they have an army of people who work full time solely creating this kind of unscrupulous crap. Blast hit upon the fact that inline linking is also essentially theft of bandwidth. Now, some may say, “It’s just an image. How bad can hotlinking a simple image be?” Well, let’s examine that… Web pages are transmitted as HTML text, which is actually quite a small file to transfer compared to images. Images may say a thousand words, but they take up ten thousand times the hard drive space. Add in the fact that if an image gets hotlinked in one forum thread, it will continue to promulgate and get hotlinked at the millions upon millions of independent blogs, forums, wikis, and all the other user-contributed sites out there. Suddenly one hotlinked image is using up hundreds if not thousands of megabytes of server bandwidth the company is paying for. And web server bandwidth is not cheap, my friends. The web space itself is not so bad; the bandwidth to transmit that web space is pretty ridiculously priced, in my opinion.

Additionally, this stolen bandwidth is not generating the return on investment the company needs or planned upon. Is there really that much of a difference between the advertising a company receives from a simple (ethical) link to their site versus just a hotlinked image plus whatever text the hotlinking user decides to provide? That is a question that you can answer with your own opinion, taking into account that it will largely depend on what user-generated content accompanies the hotlinked image. Is there a difference in the advertising the company generates? Absolutely. Remember that many sites are supported via external advertising revenue, i.e., banners and other ads distributed throughout the web page. If all you are pulling down is the company’s hotlinked image from a third-party site, you are never seeing the ads on their page.

I would also like to point out that when a company starts writing redirects to block hotlinking, they do so in a blanket fashion. It would take far too much time and resources for technical staff to manually filter which third-party sites are allowed to hotlink and what ones are not. Additionally, even if the company decides to allow forums.equipped.org to hotlink images on their site due to the fact that we do so in at least a somewhat beneficial fashion, there is no guarantee that some poster in the future will not hotlink their image(s) in a non-beneficial fashion. The only choice web site administrators really have is to block all hotlinks, which is any third-party referer [sic] at all. The only web page that gets to call and display the images are the company’s own web pages.

So far, all of these points have described what hotlinking does to a company, or more specifically, the legitimate host of the image. Now, let me add a reason that affects the user who hotlinks the images… and it is one very simple reason. The image you hotlink is not under your control. At any point in time, the legitimate host of the image can enact hotlink blocking, and suddenly your image will not work or will be redirected to an image that tells you to stop hotlinking. Your post you made several days, months, or even years ago has suddenly changed and you have no control. The host of the image can even do something as innocuous as change the filename or the folder path of the image you hotlinked, and suddenly your post has no more image in it. You have no control, and changing the filename or folder path of an image is pretty much normal web maintenance and can happen with any web site upgrade or reorganization the image host does.

In conclusion, the final reason not to hotlink images is the fact that it is easy to avoid doing so. Sites like ImageShack, TinyPic, and Photobucket were made specifically for this purpose. They allow you to upload whatever image you would like to use on a forum, blog, etc. onto their server where it is relatively permanent. I have included an example to the left, as a thumbnail to the product this thread is about. Not only is this image hosted not on TOPS Knives’ servers, but it is thumbnailed so that even our forum users who still use dial-up (God, I am so sorry, OldBaldGuy… I feel your pain.) don’t have to wait 20 years for the somewhat large image to finish loading just so they can continue reading the post. That image is hosted on ImageShack, uploaded via providing the URL from TOPS Knives’ site (so I didn’t have to download the image from TOPS then upload to ImageShack), where TOPS Knives cannot block the image or change the location in the future. My post stays the way I posted it.

So, how about we judge TOPS Knives on their products, and not their sound web site policies?

Holy cripes! For someone who is supposed to be technically literate, I surely didn't understand any of this was going on like it had been.

I suppose it is much the same as any other public media we deal with, such as TV, radio, print, billboards. There's always going to be a group out there that wants to abuse the process, either by ripping off the authors, or just degrading the content in general. The internet just opens the door to allow so much more abuse than more conventional methods I suppose. It is getting downright disgusting.

Every day I am having to scrub anywhere from 1 to several dozen spam or junk mail hits out of my corporate email account. What on earth could these spammers be trying to accomplish, other than to waste the 30 seconds or so of my time every day permanently deleting every junkmail hit. I never open any of it, I don't even read the subject lines anymore. If I don't recognize the sender, it goes straight to the junkmail folder and then the whole list gets shift-deleted. It's like the stupid tampon commercials that they crank up the audio an extra 6 db or more than the regular broadcast just so if you leave the room you can still hear it, and as soon as the show goes to commercial I am mashing the mute button.

Counterfiters, spammers, hackers, they all do nothing more than degrade the whole system.

Pretty soon I am going to have to invert my junkmail settings so that only the emails I pre-approve even get into my files. Even though that'd mean programming a list of over 500 accounts, at this point it'd probably be a shorter list than the blocked senders one is.

I guess TOPS has gotta do what they gotta do, and even if it is considered sound web site policy, I just don't like it. I don't like being grouped in with cheaters just because the application can't be programmed to differentiate somehow. Makes me feel like I can't be trusted because others abuse the system. Kinda like passing gun control legislation that takes my guns away just because some bozo or BG abuses the right. That seems like a lazy way to go about things to me.

I don't get much spam anymore, but a Wells Fargo add kept getting through, several times a day. While waiting for a phone call, I saw it come up again, so I just ketp hitting Reply and Send, sending their own crap back to them.

I haven't gotten any for two days.

Not that it would be a viable method for what you're dealing with.

For me, SPAM = NEVER BUY.

Sue

LOL, oh the irony: I purposely didn't copy the image to my PhotoBucket account and display that on the thread because I thought it might be a violation of TOPS' copyright to do so...!

"Benjammin's head now swiveling back and forth like Archie in a comic looking at Betty and Veronica in bikinis on different ends of the beach.

Guess I will need to go see the chiropractor again today after all.

I am just waiting to see from which direction the next admonishment might come from...

TGIF!

Same for me with SPAM and Telemarketers

The real irony is of course if you google 'mini signal mirror' Blocking Hotlinking can be a double edged sword for a company.

AArgh!!!