Ha! Love it.
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And for an example, in that wonderful Writing Coach, @Springer has left on drag-and-drop. So I visited, saw a tiddler that needed a minor fix (four cells out of 104 were not centered like the rest of them), dragged it to tiddlywiki.com, and although her beautiful formatting and content added by additional templates were not included, I could see the table just fine, make the changes, drag it back to ensure everything looked right, download it (from tiddlywiki.com) and attach it here:
verbs with that-clauses.json (3.7 KB)
If that hadn’t worked, I might have tried CTRL-U to view the source code in a new tab, or use the menus to find something like “Save as (CTRL-S)”. In either case, I would have looked in the results for the contents of a script with the class tiddlywiki-tiddler-store, formatted the JSON included there, and found the tiddler in there with the title "verbs with that-clauses". And I had many other options beyond that if I was dedicated. Sometimes I add #%24%3A%2FControlPanel or #%24%3A%2FAdvancedSearch to the end of the URL to open these hidden pages.
And if for some reason those aren’t working for me, there are tools like Fiddler to intercept web traffic between my machine and the web, and ones like Wire Shark that do so for web traffic as well as other protocols.
There are just so many ways.
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I think it’s worth pausing for a moment to look back at your initial use-case. Ultimately, I hear you trying to figure out:
What is the technology that will allow you to communicate content in a way that is acceptable to you and convenient (enough) for both you and students? What is unacceptable to you, and why?
Lots of what I do (and many others here — such as @Scott_Sauyet’s recent painstaking thread) do is unique and takes time to develop. That doesn’t quite get us across the inference-line to understand what you see as the real risk of sharing.
It’s not quite explicit in your initial post, but it seems the risk (expressed in “because they are unique and take days to develop”) might be something like: If people can copy this material conveniently, then they can profit from it and/or spread it in ways that prevent others from coming to me directly for the learning experience, and that’s bad for my bottom line.
OR: Your concern could be: cheap public access to this material is bad or dangerous for the actual movement practice I’m teaching. Perhaps people are likely to think they understand it based on the notes/graphic resources, but actually they really need to be part of a learning community with feedback, (or something like that), and this material needs to be carefully guarded for that reason…
Does either of the above (or both?) capture your concern?
I suspect that the best technology for communicating with your students depends on the details of your concern. If you’re worried that there’s something like copyright material that they could literally sell (or research findings that could be leveraged for competitive academic purposes, or whatever), then that’s a different issue from being worried that they’ll disseminate materials that are useless (or worse!) in the absence of more structured and interactive guidance…
Imagining myself in something like your shoes, I suspect that I would use TW for developing a wide array of materials (I think better with it, and it helps me get clear on what I’m teaching, in what order). Nonethless I would allow access only to a subset of students — people who had really invested significant effort and commitment to learning in more personally interactive ways. Is that an option?
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Q : What tips do you have to make it difficult to simply steal stuff?
As others have noted, web developers worldwide struggle with this, but it’s worth noting that a wiki is the least helpful tool you could probably use if your interest is in the protection of information rather than the proliferation of it. The way other sites get around people “stealing” content is by storing the content in a different place than the site itself and slowly sending the data to the site as the user is confirmed to be logged in or a subscriber or whatever. Many developers use a Content Management System and/or a Content Delivery System (these are both types of B2B products) to help them accomplish this.
Wikis, including Tiddlywiki, are designed to make the spread of data easier, not harder. As much as I love Tiddlywiki, the endeavor is a bit like asking a hammer to be a saw.
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Hey thats basically what I was trying to say too lol
Yours was worded better.
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I might have to adopt this expression!
Of course, this is a good general claim. Still, the fact that TiddlyWiki’s content is granular — and much of it does not appear on the surface when it loads — does help make it a tool of relative discreteness, if not genuine security.
Encryption for individual tiddlers is one way to restrict content that @TiddlyTitch may want to consider. (And as noted abov, once something is decrypted by a trusted user, nothing will effectively prevent printing or copying.)
If security is the main concern — or if there are serious legal or financial stakes in case of failure — then obviously a web-hosted TiddlyWiki (even with encrypted tiddlers) is not the right choice.
Those of us who already live in TiddlyWiki, and who want to extend our existing web-hosted projects a bit more in the direction of having some light-security padlocks, should still be exploring the possibilities here!
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Those of us who already live in TiddlyWiki, and who want to extend our existing web-hosted projects a bit more in the direction of having some light-security padlocks, should still be exploring the possibilities here
I agree. It seems like the OP’s specific needs might be better met with an LMS than a wiki, based on my limited understanding. That said, I tinker with wikis all the time not realizing I could have been sending changes to their server, until someone else in the topic mentioned it. Lol oops. When I first checked out TW, I was drawn to the fact that I could easily publish it but turned off by how those personal UI features were still visible. I am not experienced enough to know of a better solution outside of the already existing node-based ones/the blogging editions people share. I am personally partial to the single file format and to not being forced to use a desktop computer (server or not) to interact with my stuff. It’s unintentionally a super accessible webdev tool.
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My web browser automatically ignores all attempts to mess with the right-click menu so no matter what was attempted at the other end, I would be downloading that content.
ooooo which browser? <3
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I’m unsure what you mean here. Nobody’s web-hosted wiki is going to be allowing your edits to be saved to server, unless you’re authenticated (for that particular wiki) through a host like TiddlyHost…
Or did you mean something else?
Since I use TiddlyHost for nearly all my own projects (both personal and public-facing, I configure it so my saves generally go straight to server with autosave — which is a good thing! — and if I do want to try a bunch of stuff that needs to be carefully reviewed before publishing, then I make sure to turn auto-save off for a while until the result is safe for consumption. 
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Thanks!
That is exactly the kind of “frustrate the Norman normal” thief, easy to implement tip, I want to collect and try.
Right!
I don’t know how many people focused on “How To Get Your Leg Around Your Neck” are also techie-code-backroomers. But, likely few?
TT
I think so too.
The whole discussion has been very good and fruitful for me.
But I’m not yet convinced it is futile publishing stuff in TW you need to protect from simple theft.
I’ll try and distil where I am and address some of your excellent questions in a bit.
TT
Nice summary of the downside of trying using TW to try publish but with some protection.
Right.
Yet I still wonder how far can you get to frustrate (not stop … make difficult) things such that a hammer is a semi-saw. [metaphor-off].
TT
I’m not anywhere near having a Streisand Effect. I wish I were.
If I were then the problem in the O/P would disappear as (positive) notoriety would increase, not decrease.
In the Joe Bloggs TWs I write all I need do is make it harder to steal stuff than normal.
Any tips?
TT
Absolutely right. I understand now.
My query in the O/P was I think flawed in not understanding that there are accomplished programmers actively wanting to get the scripts for “The 7 Movements Of Effective Elbows” exercise.
Within TW what can I do to make your interest in elbows less about code-digging?
How can I frustrate you?
TT
TW, stand-alone, is definitely a Quine that Quine would have been proud of.
On “self awareness” in a computer routine — I’ll leave that to the Angels On A Pin Problem.
TT
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Hey now I meant that as a metaphor lol.
Like a quine can’t be a quine if it can’t ‘read’ its own source due to not being an interpreted language, or if interpreted having portions of it obscured or inaccessible somehow
I did not read the whole thread, but there is one thing I’d like to say about “block downloads, print and copy”
-
It’s not possible to block download after a site has been downloaded by the browser to show it.
-
There may be a possibility in the browser to prevent the native right-click menu, which contains "Save as … " and “View page source” …
But
- Nobody can prevent me from taking my phone and make photos from text, that interests me. → Give it to an LLM, convert it back to text and give me a summary that is written in any style I want it to be.
So as soon as something is on the web, it will be public – forever.
IMO - The only way to make it clear, how your public content is intended to be used is a proper and visible license.
A license is a legally binding document, that defines the rules, how your content should be used.
The main problem is enforceability. You basically have to create a landing page, that does one thing. - Show the license. The user has to take action to accept or decline the license and you have to be able to proof the acceptance.
If the user declines, you should send them to a different landing page with openly available promotional material. – No need to collect any user specific data.
If the user accepts the license, or your “Terms of Use” you can send them to the wiki page that contains the licensed content. – Where it still has to be visible, but should not step on the users toes anymore. Signing the TOS, will also need the consent to store user specific data on your server – If you implement it that way
IMO with TW it should be straight forward to create a TOS (Terms of Service) wiki, which basically can be an empty wiki, that only contains the TOS. If the user accepts, it can open a table of contents, which may link to other resources, if there are multiple wikis. Or it can open the wiki with the licensed content, if there is only one.
This “Landing Wiki” can use the TW browser storage plugin, that will allow you to save the state of the user consent - in the users browser. –
So you can use the landing page as a “Welcome Back” and / or a “What’s New” page, without the need to sign the TOS again. IMO a “Welcome back and What’s new” info will add some extra value and can be used to create a community around your “valuable” content.
So over time it will not make sense to “copy” or “steal” your content, because the content without the community may not be worth it. … Just some thoughts.
With the browser storage plugin no user data leaves the users devices. So no cookie banner is needed.
You only need consent if the user singes your TOS.
Implementing a backend, that stores the user consent, will probably be a challenge for most of TW users.
So here it depends how valuable “lost” content is for you. – Is it worth the expenses or not. – It depends on you.
IMO the minimum info to store, is the IP address of users that visit your licensed site. Here you will need a cookie-banner, or you’ll need a signed TOS, which IMO would be easier to enforce.
Never the less. Even if you do not store any user data or signed TOS. A proper license is still better than nothing to enforce your rights, if needed.
Just some thoughts.
-Mario
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Thanks @pmario. That post in a good summary of the legal issues. And how to, upfront, try to stop misuse.
Right.
Good you made that explicit. Since LLM’s the issues have definitely got more complicated.
TT
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We’ve had at least semi-decent Optical Character Recognetion for a generation. There may be other reason LLMs are complicating things, but I don’t think image-to-text is a major one.
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