Stopping Bandwith Theft
You're reading Mikko Saari's blog Life and opinions. This entry was written 04/12/2004, at 15:22.
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I've been a victim of theft. These thiefs haven't stolen anything material from me, but bandwidth. These sad creeps link images from other people's servers.
I studied my site logs, you see. A Deadjournal user had linked to my site and I went to see what it was about. It wasn't a link at all - she had stolen a picture from my website to use as her background image. That kind of theft can't be tolerated. If only she had even copied the picture on her web sites, but no. Well, if she wants to store her background image on my server, she must allow me to change it whenever I want... The pictures tell the story of before and after. She should be lucky I didn't use hard core porn... 
The problem is wider, however. My album cover pictures are used widely. They aren't my property as such and I don't mind someone copying them (that's what I did to get them, after all), but I don't like when people use my bandwidth to decorate their web sites.
Fortunately, there's a solution. Preventing Image Bandwith Theft With .htaccess describes how to stop the thiefs. Now you can't see the pictures, unless your referrer information tells you're coming from Melankolia.net. This will hurt some legitimate users, but not many. It's a nice solution to an annoying problem.
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Comments
I tend to be a bit more violent in those cases. As these don't happen that much, I can take it case-by-case and rename images as needed.
So my solution is to have a transparent 32bit PNG with nasty dimensions (12'000x12'000) and put it in the right place. It's filesize isn't big (as PNG is smart) and will bog most browsers down as they try to display it.
Posted by: psi- at April 12, 2004 5:57 PM