Hotlinking To Save The Internet
Over on Mastodon, Robb’s been playing with 88x31s like we used to have on our sites and blogs in the old days, and in the process it raised something called hotlinking, otherwise known as inline linking, and that in turn brought to mind an early web story I don’t think I’ve ever blogged, from the era of the fight over the Communications Decency Act.
Let me set the stage.
Over the course of 1995, when I was still back in New York City, I was one of three people running a very early internet petition drive. As things often were back then it was pretty janky: you literally just emailed an address to be added, with a message in the format SIGNED <your online address> <your full name> <U.S. Citizen> (y/n). You can see a version of what we were circulating, if you’re interested.
With the quiet, background assistance of Jonah Seiger, then at the Center for Democracy and Technology, this petition was delivered to Congress, but mostly its impact was the awareness it raised, the sense it gave “netizens” (as we said back then) of being political actors, and ultimately in inspiring CDT to put together a somewhat more legitimate and presentable petition effort also aimed at derailing the CDA.
Fast forward to 1996, by which time I’d moved to San Francisco. It’s possible that what I’m about to describe happened in 1997. Basically I am unsure if it was before or after the indecency provisions were struck down by the Supreme Court.
At any rate, while I’m not sure how the idea started, one day at a cafe somewhere in SoMa, I met with Jonah, Shabbir Safdar of Voters Telecommunications Watch, and someone from Wired/HotWired whose name I don’t recall because I’d only met them the once (although not my rooomate, who also worked there) to hatch a scheme. The pitch was this: what if there were an Internet Emergency Broadcast Network?
This, then, is where the act of hotlinking comes into the story.
Our plan was to establish a website that would offer a useful summary of current threats to the internet and the web, and actions people could take. We designed some early concepts for 486x60 banner ads and 88x31 buttons for the IEBN. Here, the very idea was for people to hotlink these images, pointing to the IEBN. The images themselves would be hosted by HotWired, and whenever there was an active threat they would be swapped out for designs meant to attract attention: an emergency alert.
The entire plan relied entirely upon encouraging hotlinking of these images, else the emergency network wouldn’t work.
Lost to the vagaries of my memory issues: whether or not we were the first to think of using hotlinking in this way, and why we never actually went through with it. I’m sure hotlinks have been used this way at some point, although I imagine such usage eventually would have been supplanted by solutions using tools like JavaScript.
Addenda
-
I’d also forgotten the names of the other two people on that original petition effort, but have been reminded by the better link I’ve swapped in above: Dave Hayes and Jon Noring.
-
If you’ve seen my homepage you might have seen the quotes from Rolling Stone. They were from an article that interviewed me about the petition. If I ever blogged the full contents it’s not imported here yet, but my mom did.
-
It’s a couple weeks later, but here’s an update. I reached out to Jonah online and he helpfully reminds me that the fourth person at the brainstorming session about the IEBN was Todd Lappin, who then was the “cyber rights” editor.