Flickr Down

Fajitas!

Is Flickr down for anyone else? Have I missed something?

DaireQuinlan

nope, down for me aswell. The horror ! The horror ! Now what on earth will I do for the rest of the evening ...

440Hz

Down for me too! Was very slow there all evening... and then it died.

I wonder what they are up to now

DaireQuinlan

I was half expecting this to happen, with all the controversy over the censorship thing I figured that someone would DDOS it at some point, if that's whats happened.

440Hz

Spoke too soon... its back

Fajitas!

Back alright...Odd though.

magicbastarder

i seemed to be having issues getting to wikipedia and another site (nasa's worldwind site) recently; the timing of them both going i put down to a DNS issue.

thebaz

magicbastarder wrote:

i seemed to be having issues getting to wikipedia and another site (nasa's worldwind site) recently; the timing of them both going i put down to a DNS issue.

i used to find boards real slow, but in fairness its picked up, but wikipedia needs some kind of boost , great site , but painfully slow

Fajitas!

Wikipedia is gone dreadful slow.

Fionn

i hadn't realised there was a censorship issue with Flickr/Yahoo
just read this
http://thomashawk.com/2007/05/flickr-censorship.html

and some of the BS thats going on in Germany and a few other places

makes me sorta glad i don't have a pro account and giving them money!!!

:mad:

Calina

just on that last thing Fionn,

wrt Germany, if they are trying to adhere to local legislation, I'd say, give them some slack with it. Every localised site as to do it.

wrt to the Rebekka saga, ultimately the reason the photo/post/comments were pulled was not OMFG Censorship but that the content of some of those comments was very incendiary.

If people in general want Flickr to be reasonable, then they need to be reasonable too. However, a certain amount of time moderating a couple of internet fora has led me to realise that expecting internetusers to be reasonable all the time is a tall order. Some flickr users can be completely and utterly obnoxious - witness some of the more incandescent debates on the flickr blog and forums and the day they cut the number of reciprocal contacts and limited the number of tags you could attach to a single image...there was wholescale war.

on a final note as commentators go, Thomas Hawk is not one I would choose. Of late, many of his entries amount to Zooomr good, Flickr bad. Yes he's CX of Zooomr and yes he has a heavy presence on Flickr. But his emphasis has changed. TBH, I think there's something tacky about continueing to use Flickr under his circumstances but...strangely, he did for a long time after he had a conflict of interest there.

I like the service I get from Flickr, and I like the way I can seemlessly integrate it with other sites. On balance, there are some things I would like, some gadgetry I wouldn't mind getting...but the way I see it, they are getting there and they have a lot of stuff in place that I haven't managed to configure for my own site yet.

DaireQuinlan

Yeah but its the way they've gone about it that I think has gotten everyone's backs up. A week ago everybody was like "OMG ! Localisation !! cool !!" and then 2 days later everyone had switched to "WTF ?!? OMFG ! CENSORSHIP !!" when they discovered they new .. umm ... features ... exposed by the switch to localisation.

In addition there's either a flaw in their entire method or a worrying precedent. At the moment its entirely voluntary whether or not you mark your picture as unsafe, and there's only the ONE setting which they've used to block a whole range of pictures across 4 different countries with wildly different laws. What happens when everyone just starts ignoring the 'unsafe' thing ? And not self-moderating their pictures ? They just introduced that a couple of months back if I recall. The next logical step is for EVERY SINGLE PICTURE that could potentially cause them trouble in ANY of the territories they've decided to censor for is FORCIBLY tagged with 'unsafe' , and any troublemakers removed. Germany ? Hong Kong ?? Korea ??? SINGAPORE ??? Have you any idea how restrictive the laws are in HK and Singapore ?

-edit- Oh yeah, and Thomas Hawk ? pfff. Nothing but pimping his flickr clone. thats it. Notice how many times in that article he points out that if HE were in charge, then HE would certainly support her blah blah blah. Its dishonest at best. -edit-

-edit2- Just browsing through the forum threads on this there, and yes, several people have had their entire streams set to restricted. Lots of debate over it. General consensus is that they had one or two pictures that had'nt been tagged, so the flicke administrative team decided to save them the trouble of doing it ... -edit2-

Fionn

well as i said i didn't know there was any sort of issue going on - i don't read blogs or stuff much so i suppose thats how i missed it, the first i knew of it was Katie's comment.
I've never heard of hawk until yesterday - his blog was the first hit when i searched for Censorship flickr/yahoo

yeah i can cut them some slack over their German operation - it's not like i'm living there! I don't know if i'd be as calm if they were exercising the same zeal here in Ireland tho! I think it's localisation gone completely mad tho!
heres one German's view of it


I think the bottom line with the Rebekka thing is that a lone photographer was being ripped off by a thieving operator (power seller) :rolleyes: under the e-bay corporate umbrella and another corporate heavy decided to attempt to crush this person for daring to speak out against it.

one link i thought was hilarious and sort of sums it all up for me - there's always someone out there that think they know better whats good for me - well no thanks I'll try do my own thinking!!!

most of this stuff happened during the latter part of May - i obviously wasn't looking paying as much attention as i should have

Morlar

Am I reading that right if your based in one of those 4 countries (Germany, Singapore etc) your now stuck with a safe search forced to be on when using flickr ? If thats the case its the most ridiculous thing I have read in a long time. I thought devart was a bit nanny-state sometimes but that takes the piss. Jesus.