How to prevent someone from hacking API feed?

Question

I have started developing a webpage and recently hired someone to write code to display a customized feed (powered by API) in the middle panel on http://farmball.com/. Note that this is not the RSS feed tied to the site blog. The feed ties to my account on another site. There is no RSS link for an average user to subscribe to the feed. I've taken the site out of maintenance mode to ask anyone here with scraping/hacking experience how someone would most easily go about 'taking' the feed and displaying it on their own site. More importantly, what can I do to prevent it?

^Updated for re-wording

Answer 1

what can I do to prevent...'taking' the feed and displaying it on their own site?

Nothing. Preventing reuse goes against the basic concept of RSS, which is to make it as easy as possible for anyone to do anything they want with it. It was designed from the ground up to be Really Simple to Syndicate, not Really Hard to Retransmit Without Permission.

You could restrict access to the feed itself to trusted users only by making them provide some credentials or pass in a key to the feed (e.g. yoursite.rss?mykey=abc123). But you cannot control use. Only access.

Answer 2

You can't.

If you are going to expose an RSS feed which you don't want others to be able to display on their site then you are completely missing the point of RSS. The entire reason for Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is to make your content externally consumable- whether that's in an RSS Reader or through someone simply printing its content on their own website.

Why are you including an RSS feed if you do not want someone to be able to consume it?

Answer 3

Be explicit about your license. It isn't a technology solution, as others have mentioned, the technology is an open technology-- this isn't DRM! But if you ask in each post that people who use this feed to not repost/fail to give credit/etc then some people will respond to the request.

Otherwise, you're better off putting your content behind a password and using a paid subscription model for distributing your content.

Answer 4

This is a DRM problem essentially. If you had some technique that you could put content on the web without having it redistributable, the music industry would love you.

It is possible to try to prevent redistribution. One technique you could try is embedding a signature of some sort into the feed for each user who you require to sign up. If the content is found on the web, you can identify and ban the user who redistributed your content.

This is avoidable too, by getting multiple accounts and normalizing the content to remove fingerprints. For the would-be pirate, this requires more effort than they may be willing to put in. Your signature could be a unique whitespace pattern, tiny variances in the timestamps on posts, misplaced pixels in videos, or any other thing you can vary slightly without end users noticing.

Answer 5

use .htpassword better yet, don't put something private in a public place where it's likely to get picked up by software automatically. Like others have said, it's a pretty odd question, if you're trying to figure something else out, you're better off being explicit with what you want to know.