Protecting Webpage Content

[GuestHouse]

I'm considering changing the business model on one of my websites - changing from pay for information to free information with attached advertising and services.

The problem of course is as soon as my information is on the webpage, it is up for grabs.

Anyone any advice on how to protect my source code and information?

[h90]

I'm considering changing the business model on one of my websites - changing from pay for information to free information with attached advertising and services.

The problem of course is as soon as my information is on the webpage, it is up for grabs.

Anyone any advice on how to protect my source code and information?

It is normaly always possible to grap the info, you might be able to make it a bit more difficult but basically it is always possible to get it out somehow...

(at least I could always grap what I wanted with some tricks or tools).

[Khun Jean]

You can put the information in a PDF file and secure it so people can not copy and past from it.

That will stop the most people, and the lazy ones.

[cnxpat]

If you find the clue, I am sure the RIAA (for instance) will make you a US$ millionaire (probably zillionaire) overnight! There is no way to secure contents.

You can charge member to access "subscribers only contents" easily, after that, what they do with it (copy, make mp3's, distribute on P2P networks) is beyond your control unfortunately. A website, anything published on the web and it's content is by default not private.

And I am sure you've managed to get a few around "terms of agreement" as well. if you have read them in the first place :-)

I am sure this doesn't help, but don't shoot the messenger!

[h90]

You can put the information in a PDF file and secure it so people can not copy and past from it.

That will stop the most people, and the lazy ones.

there are password hacking programs, don't know how good they are at the moment. Sometimes it is nearly impossible to hack it with a normal computer.

My second idea would be, and sure there are better one, make the highest resultion my screens can do (2 screens) open the doc and make a screenshoot and let a OCR run on it.

But I guess max will be 5-10 pages at once. Sure there are better solutions for that but I am getting definitly too old for it....

[chingching]

changing from pay for information to free information.....

Anyone any advice on how to protect my xxxx information?

Isn't this a contradiction. If u r going to give it away for free what are you trying to protect. U can copyright it. as for yr source code u can put in some java scripts to prevent it showing.

[h90]

changing from pay for information to free information.....

Anyone any advice on how to protect my xxxx information?

Isn't this a contradiction. If u r going to give it away for free what are you trying to protect. U can copyright it. as for yr source code u can put in some java scripts to prevent it showing.

no thats different.

For example I have 2 companies one for hydraulic seals and one for modchips for PS2 and XBox but in both cases it is the same.

You either don't give to much technical details than you don't look like a specialist, you look like you want to make a lot money in a short time and don't care anything else.

Or you give a lot background infos. Customer might find you due a search engine, if they give their rarely find problem in. Customer might bookmark you because a lot value infos and later may order from you or pass your url to other companies.

On the other hand if you work for month to produce high value content and than "h90" the ripper comes and just take all the content from "guesthouses" with an automatic software. Only changing the url and companies name and even tell on the homepage that "guesthouse" has stohlen everything than it it is not soo helpfull.

Internet is a hard place.....

[Crushdepth]

Protecting open information on the web is extremely difficult. You can't really *stop* people so the best defense may be to make it painful or time consuming for people to extract large quantities of info from your site. Unfortunately this can also screw up the usability of your site if you aren't careful. It is also worthwhile getting nasty about copyright if people rip you off - while webmasters rarely listen, commercial webhosting companies often do if you submit a complaint (they usually reserve the right to close sites in breach of the law etc in the terms of service).

I think there are ways to stop some of the automated web slurping tools that can suck down your site in one go (one web CMS I use has a module that lets you ban IPs automatically if they hit your site too often or start eating all your bandwidth and I assume there would be stand alone scripts that would do the same thing).

Re. source code, what are you using? If it's just html then maybe you're out of luck...but if it's PHP etc. then people don't get the source code when they load the page, they just get the html output, and you can stop people downloading the code by setting appropriate CHMOD access permissions on the files.

Good idea to make sure every folder has an index.html file in it to prevent people from freely browsing the contents of your directories. You can also restrict access to directories with htaccess files if your webserver is Apache.

Re PDFs mentioned above, while Acrobat will let you lock down the contents of documents in various ways, some 3rd party PDF software doesn't honour such restrictions.

Anyway, hope that helps, i'm out of steam.

Internet is a hard place.....

So true...it's a jungle out there...

Edited September 5, 2006 by Crushdepth

[Plus]

I don't quite understand that protect with PDF stuff - my Opera always saves .pdf files on a hard disk first, then asks if I want to open them. I use Foxit reader and there's a Text tool there that can highlight and copy anything I want.

I haven't stolen anything that way yet, just extracted text from PDF books to change the fonts and make lines longer.

[h90]

I don't quite understand that protect with PDF stuff - my Opera always saves .pdf files on a hard disk first, then asks if I want to open them. I use Foxit reader and there's a Text tool there that can highlight and copy anything I want.

I haven't stolen anything that way yet, just extracted text from PDF books to change the fonts and make lines longer.

should be possible to set a password so you can't copy/paste and can't print. But I am very outdated on that topic and it never stoped me

[Crushdepth]

This is what I meant by 3rd party PDF software not honouring Adobe's PDF security...one of the hazards of open specifications!

(I'd prefer to use the word 'standard' but then I would be kicked by zealots) :-)

[John_Betong]

I'm considering changing the business model on one of my websites - changing from pay for information to free information with attached advertising and services.

The problem of course is as soon as my information is on the webpage, it is up for grabs.

Anyone any advice on how to protect my source code and information?

PS I was curious if I could do it using Photoshop and it was quite easy.

Cheers,

John_Betong

[h90]

I'm considering changing the business model on one of my websites - changing from pay for information to free information with attached advertising and services.

The problem of course is as soon as my information is on the webpage, it is up for grabs.

Anyone any advice on how to protect my source code and information?

PS I was curious if I could do it using Photoshop and it was quite easy.

Cheers,

John_Betong

your picture, than "CTRL+C" open paperport, "ctrl+v" send to "notepad", ocr running automatic and I got that back (time total below 10 sec) :

Edit: (of course I got it as text, Thaivisa making that quote thing again)

I'm considering changing the business model on one of my websites - changing from pay for information to free information with attached advertising and services.

The problem of course is as soon as my information is on the webpage, it is up for grabs.

Anyone any advice on how to protect my source code and information?

Hi GuestHouse,

If the content you are trying to protect is text then how about saving the text as a jpg File and to add a watermark. That will make it a little more difficult for the average punters to extract the information.

Maybe if you could supply a sample or more details then I am sure that someone will be able to offer a more suitable solution.

Cheers, John_Betong

Edited September 6, 2006 by h90

[Simmo]

PS I was curious if I could do it using Photoshop and it was quite easy.

Cheers,

John_Betong

You can take that jpg put it into a OCR program and have the plain text back in 10 seconds.

[Khun Jean]

I think the main thing is to not make it easy.

It is impossible to protect it 100%. Big organisations are busy with that decades and still it is not available.

If you make it a big task for someone to copy your information they might give up.

Making OCR more difficult is easy, just put a grid behind the text. Not foolproof but it will stop the non OCR experts.

You can add some script to your page that will intercept the context menu. People (unskilled) will be unable to see your source HTML.

Same for stopping a select action. You can stop it but again only for people who are not skilled with browser settings and computers.

It is easy to get around but again most people would have no idea how to do it.

If you do a combination, you make it extremely difficult for the normal user, difficult for the 'power' user, and a nuisance for the capable ones.

Good luck.

[A_Traveller]

Given the situation the OP outlines, there are a couple of options but as has been pointed out, in reality if someone wants to get the data they will.

One option might be to subscribe to a copyright service which takes the text and then searches the net for plagiaristic copies of it. I've included a link to such a service and also one to an encryptor. The encryptor is not as full proof as their site suggests but it does offer an option to increase the difficulty of extracting data, but there are consequent impacts which have to be weighed up, such as search engine, accessibility issues etc.

On balance I've never been convinced that such 'protection' {safe-net anyone!} is worth the effort required by the originator nor the risk of the site failing at the user level. I note the encryptor doesn't fully encrypt their own site

Regards

Non -Plagiarism http://www.copyscape.com/signup.php?pro=0&o=m

Encryption http://www.aerotags.com/products/tlp.php