Hide referer

guest

ok im setting up some filedownloads on my site and what i want is for people to be directed to the files but not to have my site be a referer to the peoples sites that im downloading from what can i do in order to stop that?

bretticus

Well, unless plan on providing your own browser, you may be out of luck. You see, it's your browser that offers the referrer information to the server whenever you click a link. However, I believe--though I haven't played with this for awhile and am unaware of any changes made with new versions of IE or Firefox, etc.--that if you use JavaScript to go to external links you can avoid having the browser send this information. I recommend playing around with window.location.replace and other functions and monitoring the headers with a tool such as ieHTTPHeaders. Can be downloaded here.

UPDATE: I guess it's worth mentioning that you could write a script that uses the PHP function Header() to manually write the headers to the browser to GET the external file.

guest

wait.. i think i got an idea! do any of you know some free redirection siteS?!?! like that have the url be www.site.com/?for=www.google.com and it would forward it to google.com, do any of you have any of those websites?

bretticus

Well, I doubt you want to go through anonymzer.com or another "proxy" type website because then you are at the mercy of how these Websites choose to work at a given time. For example, I believe anonymizer only gives you so many page views and then prompts you to login or pay or something (not real sure here) the point being that you don't want to have your Website dependant on somebody elses that can and will change stuff without descretion.

Really, JavaScript or writing your own redirect script would be a more rock-solid approach.

UPDATE: on second thought, a javascript redirect is probably your best bet as a redirect may incite your browser to send referrer information again you can test this with the tool I mentioned.

guest

no im talkin about something liek http://en.safeurl.de/?http://www.google.com that one of them i have but i need some more forwarder!!

guest

Roger_Ramjet

All you need is a page with this

 window.location = "url"

</script>
<head>
</html>

uploaded where ever you can find webspace and you've got your free redirection site.

Redirection without referrer info sounds like bandwidth/content stealing to me.