Domas Mituzas wrote:
As for image (or any other) hosting - WMF would have completely no power over privacy policy then - unless whole world agreed to turn off Referer [sic] request headers. Of course, that aside, there're quite some other issues with efficiency, and it is mostly about 'reducing costs' rather than 'improving user experience'.
You could get them by FTP. Still, there's the leak of IP address and which image you're seeing (most have an associated area). And some clients may reveal the email. And there's still the problem of faking the content: 'i asked for POTD, and get the "goatse" image'. Let's use ed2k protocol for images :D
It would be much easier just to have someone donate few gigabits of IP transit ;-)
Not everybody can give a few gigas of IP transit ;)