Something Funny With Flickr
The Flickr block was very very odd - in that it was so easy to get around both by the webmaster and by the user for websites where the webmaster was too damn lazy to adjust.
Basically, the 'Flickr Block' was a block against the servers (farm1.static.flickr.com and farm2.static.flickr.com) Flickr photos were stored on (with URLs as subdomains of Flickr) rather than the root, flickr.com.
Late last week reports that the Access Flickr plugin was starting not to work began to circulate. At the beginning of October Flickr introduced the farm3.static.flickr.com server - essentially a new server farm. The Access Flickr plugin was updated to re-write the URL of a Flickr request. Then the plugin designed to allow one to freely view a site stopped working again. Checking out the problem made it obvious... Flickr have started blocking access to photos via IP address, but at the same time the GFW dropped it's objection to Flickr. Nice co-incidence.
So, to allow visitors to view Flickr photos, drop those Flickr server re-writes and the Access Flickr plugin, at least that's what it seems like this evening.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Furl
Google
Yahoo
Technorati
hao hao
Slashdot It
Damn, Flickr
Having just written this... it seems no longer to be the case.
Flickr RSS feeds and 3rd party linking seem to be all over the place. Not sure why. An example:
Farm 3:
Open this link over a proxy: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2269/1740247862_fa25059da6_o.jpg - it should open fine. Now open this (replacing the farm3.static.flickr.com with an IP address for the server) http://69.147.90.158/2269/1740247862_fa25059da6_o.jpg - there will be an Access Denied error.
Do the same without a proxy (inside China) and the page with farm3 in the URL should open fine, while the page with the IP address in the URL should not.
Farm 1 and 2:
The same test. Open this random picture I browsed with a proxy http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1032/596142984_770c57d3f4_m.jpg (should be toilet paper/mouse combo - how cute) now open it again using the IP address instead of the URL (http://69.147.123.56/1032/596142984_770c57d3f4_m.jpg) and the Access Denied error, as with Farm 3 above, will show up. This was not the case until a week ago. In this example exactly the same photo is being retrieved so user permissions should not come into the equation.
Again, do the same without a proxy (inside China). The URL with Farm2 in it should result in a blank page, the link with the IP address in the URL should result in the Access Denied page.
Conclusion:
From trying to access the photos tested above via a URL using the server's IP address, for both Farm3 and Farm2, It is clear (as of this moment this evening) that Yahoo/Flickr have disabled access to their server content via URLs with an IP address and therefore prevented Chinese/Iranian Firewall circumvention measures that the Firefox 'Access Flickr' plugin provides. It is not clear whether Flickr meant this to happen, or if it is a side effect of other efforts they've been making.
In China, the Farm3.static.flickr.com server seems to be unblocked, for now. Little chance of accessing older photos (pre Farm3/pre October) without going 100% through a proxy, or using an overseas website to cache photos fed through RSS.
Post new comment