Protecting data on a web server from site hijackers / copiers
I have mp3 files hosted on my web server in a shared folder (I host it in a shared folder so that the player on my site can access those files), I don't care if the user can download an MP3 that he can view , while the player is playing this file, however, I also take care that he cannot view the direct url of the file. But I want to protect these files from grabber software so that some1 cannot steal all files hosted on the server.
The other part of the question is, what is the scope of site hijacking software, can I block them by simply disabling indexes for my directories, or do they also have access to files whose URLs are not embedded in the page?
Please, help
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I'm afraid there is no way to prevent the user from getting your file. To play the audio file, the user's web browser must download it to their local computer.
You can prevent standard web grabber from being hijacked with robots.txt or properties rel="nofollow"
for hyperlinks, but their interpretation is client-side, so the grabber can just ignore them when it seems (I once wrote a webgrabber that didn't even look at them. was mostly out of laziness and not from malicious intent).
tl; dr: If you don't want people to download the file, don't put it on the Internet.
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