More questions after Flickr banned

After Flickr was blocked in China, I've introduced Williamlong's idea of making flickr-hosted photos visitable to websites readers. And i supposed that most flickr and firefox users knew that there was an fantastic add-on Access Flickr! which worked very well.

Today, i received an email from John Pasden, and he asked How does Access Flickr! work and if it works similarly to the IP proxy method I've mentioned before?

For the first question, we can do an analysis by ourselves: Download Access Flickr! add-on (access_flickr!-1.5-fx.xpi), unzip it, open a file named overlay.js and will see the following content which tells how the add-on work

var exchangeSource = new Array(
/^([^\.]*\.?)farm2.static.flickr.com$/i, //4
/^([^\.]*\.?)static.flickr.com$/i, //3
/^([^\.]*\.?)blog.flickr.com$/i, //2
/^([^\.]*\.?)flickr.com$/i //1
);

var exchangeDest = new Array(
'storage2.flickr.vip.re2.yahoo.com', //4
'storage1.flickr.vip.re2.yahoo.com', //3
'flickr.blogs.com', //2
'www.flickr.mud.yahoo.com' //1
);

As the codes show, Access Flickr! works as an automatic tool that substitute banned image URLs with other known URLs pointing to the same host! This method is quite different from the IP proxy method, hence, the latter doesn't work for flickr.

John Pasden also asks if there are any solutions that all visitors will be able to see the Flickr-hosted photos on his site without Access Flickr! The answer is YES, just refer to this post for detail operation, Wordpress users can use this plugin(via) which will automatically replace the blocked Flickr URLs .