whisper

[lucy24]

UA: whisper/8.11.8 (sh.whisper.whisperapp; build:201812141517; iOS 12.1.2) Alamofire/4.5.1
IP: various, probably human ISPs
Behavior: requests a few images, with no referer (thereby avoiding anti-hotlink code)

I don't know what this is, but possibly someone with an iPhone can shed light. I'm inclined to think it involves human activity. So far it hasn't shown up often enough to merit blocking or other action.

[tangor]

I've noticed it recently ... wondering when the companion versions SHOUT, YELL, and SHUSH! will appear?

I do appreciate that the UAs are becoming more entertaining. :)

[lucy24]

Frankly it makes me think of that enormously irritating commercial from some decades back, “If you want to catch someone’s attention ... whisper.”

Yah.

[tangor]

Sadly, dear friend lucy24, that merely affirms yet once again what comes around keeps coming back! Argggh!

OR

There's nothing new under the sun, just window-dressing of the current decade...

HOWEVER, the need to address these things continues apace!

[Pfui]

Courtesy of Wikipedia:

"Whisper is a proprietary iOS and Android mobile app available without charge. It is a form of anonymous social media, allowing users to post and share photo and video messages anonymously..."

Initial release in 2012. Big user numbers as of 2017 (per Wikipedia). Stable releases through April, 2019.
Site: [whisper.sh...]

[en.wikipedia.org...]

Funny how people will think what they whisper is private -- yet they have Location Services turned on.

[lucy24]

As I suspected: it really is just another kind of hotlink. If I start seeing it more often, I'll add it to the same RewriteRule that currently deals with OpenOffice.

Funny, I never think of wikipedia. (One exception: Our friendly local reference librarian says it's a good source for looking up the order of books in a series, in those cases where the author hasn't done it for you by starting with A is for Alibi.)

[Pfui]

Not sure what you mean by a hotlink? It reminded me of WhatsApp as opposed to Word and its content-saving ilk OpenOffice/Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice.

Wikipedia's handy for overviews and footnotes if not unbiased accuracy. Handier still since it always lands near the top of Google and DuckDuckGo search results. (Wonder what the trade-off was for that arrangement?)

[lucy24]

It's a hotlink in the sense that someone is posting your image, or a link to your image, by means other than coming from the page the image lives on. And, like OpenOffice, it doesn't send a referer; you have only the User-Agent to go by. But, unlike say f'rexample Facebook, the image isn't accompanied by a link to your page. At least I don't get the impression it is--and there's certainly no benefit to me if someone looks at one of my pictures in isolation.

[Pfui]

Better late than never... (Sorry, I've never gotten e-notices of replies.) Ah, that hotlinking. Wow, that's something we've all blocked for forever but I haven't seen the word for a while. FWIW, I also prevent hotlinks to PDFs and ZIPs and the like. No point in compilation/click-bait sites referring bandwidth-wasting scrapers to sizable files.

[lucy24]

A few days ago I had occasion to tweak the RewriteRule that deals with OpenOffice. As long as I was in there, I added whisper to the list.

Mwa ha ha.

[tangor]

The work is never done. (sigh)

Then again, keeps us on our toes!

[dstiles]

Hotlinking - how many baddies does it actually block? I've considered it but you only have to run with no referer and you get away with it. I suppose I should do it anyway but I don't think I have any attractive properties on my apache sites.

[lucy24]

you only have to run with no referer and you get away with it

Fortunately, most hotlinkers are not very bright: the ones I mostly see are people with simple CMS sites who sincerely and honestly don't know that you are not supposed to do this, not only because of the using-other-people's-content thing but because massive hotlinking creates an abominable user experience. I suspect most of them genuinely don't realize this, because all the hotlinked images are already in their browser cache, so they don't notice anything unusual when they open their page for the first time.

Or, in the alternative, there are the institutionalized hotlinkers who omit a referer but are dim enough to use a recognizable User-Agent like whisper or OpenOffice which can then be subject to the same hotlinking code, mutatis mutandis.

:: detour for number-crunching ::

Of all image requests, non-blocked (200 or 3xx response) refererless requests from user-agents other than named bot/spider/crawler/facebook represent less than 3% of the total--and that includes those human browsers that don't send a referer at any time. The proportion drops to <2% on my personal site, which is HTTPS but also different in other ways.

[dstiles]

Guess it's time to enable the code, then. Thanks, Lucy. :)