The Consequences Of Hotlinking

Ahh, I enjoyed my vacation from the site, but I'm glad to be back. Well this actually happened a while back but I thought I would tell anyway.

As I was taking a gander at my referrer logs for this site, I noticed an enormous amount of hits from a site called "kstatefans.com". I was curious to find out why in the world a sports message board would be linking to me, so I investigated. It turns out one of the users on the board had "hotlinked" one of my images. The image in question was a very large (150 K) image of an 18th century illustration of a monkey, and their hotlink was really draining my bandwidth. As I perused the messages on the board, I became disgusted, not only at the dim-witted theft of a huge image and tons of my precious bandwidth, but at the stupidity, inanity and homophobia of most of the messages on the board. I had originally planned to just remove the image from my server, but now I wanted revenge.

So I simply created another image called "18thcenturymonkeybig.jpg" and uploaded it to the same directory as the original one. Voila! Instant retribution. In case they ever change the image link, I've taken a snapshot of the switcheroo and preserved it for posterity here. ( there's a bit of swearing)
http://www.evanizer.com/stuff/hotlink1.jpg

russ20

That is funny!

Very nice

i had done this to someone hotlinking from one of my sites

this gives me an idea

many people are using

[personal attacking avatar link removed by moderator] as there avatars of this forum and the jaydillar forum i should change it to something else :P

Thanks kiwi

That's a funny one Russ.

Mine looks better now!

too bad about the other

@ jayshirt pic very funny

Perhapps the only way to keep the number of hotlinked images down is to make a habit of changing the names of the images that you are using on a fairly regular basis.

The main problem of changing the location of links and images is that it is time consuming. However, when you move your images you are breaking the links on the hotlinker's site, and if they want to fix it they will have to do some work (and research if they are still intent on hotlinking your images) to fix the problem.

Of course, if you have a persistant site owner that ignores all your requests to stop using your images then you might want to contact their host to let them know about the problem, they should deal with the issue fairly quickly if they are reputable. While you are at it, you might want to ask your host if they could implement a server solution to prevent it from happening in the future.

russ20

That's great

I know exactly what your talking about!

Just recently I had a thread on this forum about someone who actually "stole" my website.. the whole design, images, links... you name it.. (a few things had been changed but yeah.)

This would have been effecting my bandwidth and it was only a fluck that I even found out!

I can now understand why get paid sites say "please copy/save" this image to your own computer then link from there as bandwidth is becoming more and more of an issue and more and more expensive!

how can someone check who is using your bandwith? i'm never over mine, but it would be nice to know!!

well my host has tracking on where you badwidth is being used
it shows a link and what image was used

maybe try emailing your host and ask if they have anything like this

hmm, that would be ihug....maybe i'll just go have a look at their site. thanx kiwi

actually Apache can be configured to disallow remote linking.

Can't you just program sites not to allow right clicking? Wouldn't that stop it?

No because by going to the site, the image is in the browser cache.
A "no-cache" meta tag can be added to the head of the HTML file.
However getting around right-click blocking is child's play.
The only true way to stop it, is to configure the web server to disallow it.

This is True The scripts may be an effective method of preventing someone who is new to the Web from stealing your images. The images aren't actually protected as there are many ways to disable or get around the scripts. (I won't go into those details here because my purpose is not to provide instruction on image stealing techniques.) Also the scripts are almost guaranteed to annoy (or offend) Web-savvy site visitors.
Javascript rollovers can be used to make image theft more difficult -- but certainly can't prevent it. Other quick and easy methods of discouraging image theft include :

Slicing Images

Another way to discourage image theft is to cut the image into pieces. The pieces can be spliced back together in table cells so that they will appear to be a single image.


No right mouse click script
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex9/noright3.htm

There are many other techniques to make image theft more difficult but these are the best I think.

russ20

stealing websites is very easy. All you have to do is "save page as" from your browser and you have all the HTML and all the pictures on your disk. here is nothing that can protect you from that. Yesterday I wanted to check how long it woud take to make a fake site and it took me just two hours to make a working copy of ez-bucks website, even better than those "EZ-BONDS" one.

The only way of protecting ourselves is vigilancy and zero tolerance towards design thieves.

wow kiwinz... love it!

Have you been back to the sports board to see if anyone has commented on what you had done??? would love to see how freaked out this guy must have been to see what you had done So funny need the laugh

LOL it's still there!!

http://www.kstatefans.com/UBBcgi/ultimateb...009470;go=newer

It's down where AzCat says: Mack Brown?

Enjoy!
russ20

Thats such a good idea..............i gotta rememember that one.....

LMAO!!! Awesome!

Do these hosting companies have some sort of alliance concerning standards
of acceptable behavior?
You would think after investigating a complaint like this they would send these peeps a warning, do it again and be booted off the host system.

OMG TOO F* FUNNY!!!