Fusker

Fusker is a type of website or utility that extracts images from a web page, typically from free hosted galleries. Fusker software allows users to identify a sequence of images with a single pattern, for example:

http://www.example.com/images/pic[1-16].jpg

This would identify images pic1.jpg, pic2.jpg, through pic16.jpg.

When this pattern is given to a fusker website, the website would produce a page that displays all sixteen images in that range. Patterns can also contain lists of words, such as http://www.example.com/images/{small,medium,big}.jpg, which will produce three urls, each with one word from the bracketed list. The web page is then presented to the person who entered the fusker, and can also be saved on the fusker web server so that other people may view it.

Fusker implementations

Fusker software appears to extract images from their original location and displays them in a new web page. Each image is separated from the surrounding information that the provider of the image may have wanted, like enticements for a paysite or links to affiliate websites. However, the images are not copied by the fusker technology; the new page that the fusker technology produces instructs the browser to retrieve each image from its host web server and display it in the context of the new page.

Many server-side implementations of the Fusker technology are available on the web.

Criticism

Visitors to a fusker website frequently see copyrighted pornographic images that have been separated from their intended context, known as hot-linking. Companies that provide free hosted galleries strongly dislike fuskers because they have the potential to cost them a lot of money in bandwidth bills, and because the only reason the free galleries are provided is to entice the user into clicking on a more profitable link, and those links are no longer displayed from fusker sites.

In response, most web site administrators check the [referer|referer] field to prevent their images from being "fuskered", or require users to log in.

Fusker websites usually include a mechanism for reporting fuskers that contain illegal content.

Etymology

"Fusker" is a Danish term which originally meant a person covertly doing work outside the official guilds. It came into Danish around 1700 from German pfuscher, meaning a dabbler, botcher, or charlatan. Later it came to mean someone cheating (for example using company resources for personal benefit) or alternately doing shoddy work.

In English it nearly exclusively refers to the meaning described in this article.

History

The original fusker technology was created by Mikkel Carthag Tuek, who made the Perl CGI script as a work-alike of the UNIX/Linux cURL tool, specifically its URL-globbing functionality. Fusker was first publicized in late 2001 and was removed two years later, as the bandwidth usage became too unwieldy and the author preferred to avoid commercializing the site with advertisements. The original script also had a bug that would occasionally cause memory overflows. Several versions are available under a Perl license on Tuek's homepage.

The idea has been continued by others and ported to other scripting languages. There also exist JavaScript (urlscan.hierzo.be) and Python implementations.