Monday, May 23rd, 2005, 3:09 am
Stolen Graphics
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Graphics and photography on this site is either openly shareable or self-produced. Yet, there are cases where thieves HotLink images — that is — they refer to images on another site, thereby exploiting others for bandwidth. Fat Sam from NNTP://alt.www.webmaster posted this hilarious message today:
We’ve probably all experienced the problems of people remotely linking to images on our websites….
Well, this made me laugh…I found it in another newsgroup, but I thought it would be relevant here….Imagine the scene
Ebayer1 decides to sell a graphics card, and in order to better show the product, he links to some images that he has stored on his own server….
Along comes Ebayer2, who happens to be selling the same graphics card….He checks ebay to see if anyone is selling anything similar, and finds Ebayer1′s auction with all those lovely extra images….
So he decides to remotely link to them too….Naturally, Ebayer1 notices this extra traffic, probably in his referral logs, so he changes the images on his server…..
The resulting page of Ebayer2′s auction can be seen here (UPDATE: The seller changed the pictures after a few days, but one of the pictures is shown at the top of this item)
I especially love the image of the Plasma TV with the caption, “This Plasma TV included free”….
May 24th, 2005 at 4:07 pm
I have this iPod photo that I took that’s proven to be very popular to link to. So I used ModRewrite to give a 403 error. It’s really annoying when people use up you bandwidth without asking. But I guess I need to change it to a picture instead
May 26th, 2005 at 3:57 am
Yes, I have done something along these lines:
http://www.schestowitz.com/UseNet/2005/February_2005/msg00081.html