Cyde Weys Musings

There’s a great story about one man’s battle against image hotlinking that hit Digg today. Long story short, some MySpace profile “design firm” hotlinked to this poor guy’s image, causing hundreds of thousands of hits by random people loading MySpace profiles. In order to get revenge (and stop the drain on his server’s resources), he changed the image to Goatse and added the text, “dear myspace users: please stop hotlinking my stuff. look what you did to my ass.” The response is even funnier: clueless MySpace users started yelling at him, accusing him of hacking, not even seeming to comprehend that all he did was change an image on his server, and if common web etiquette rules were being followed, it wouldn’t have affected anyone else.

I bring this story up because I had some hotlinking issues of my own. I used to run a site called Fyre. It was hosted on a Linux server in my house running on an old ADSL connection. The connection had 15 KB/s max upload bandwidth, and some jackass was hotlinking to a nice wallpaper-sized image of Sephiroth that took eight seconds to transmit over my connection (the image is below the fold). Of course, while the image was transmitting, all of the other traffic over the connection would go down as well, so there would be these huge lag spikes in whatever I, or anyone else in my family, was doing at the time: web surfing, chatting, but worst of all, playing games.

The worst part was that this idiot was using the image in his signature on a popular-ish gaming forum. Let that sync in for awhile. He was using an 800×600 image as a signature. Which basically meant that, at the end of each of his posts, you had to scroll down an entire screen just to see what the next person had written. I don’t know what kind of idiotic forum this was where this kind of thing was tolerated, but a lot of the other posters there had signatures almost as bad, so it seemed endemic.

So I ended up changing the Sephiroth image to a picture of gay porn (I thought of Goatse, but I didn’t want to foist Goatse on them; I figured everyday normal gay sex was slightly less disgusting). Watching the ensuing panic on the forum was hilarious. Instantly, every post he had on the forum, which was several hundred posts, were displaying gay sex. Needless to say, he changed the image very quickly. Looking back on this, he probably didn’t even know what happened. Oblivious, he doubtless went on and just hotlinked some other poor sap’s image.

I faced similar image hotlinking problems over the years, but I never used the “gay porn solution” after that first time. It was probably overkill. They were probably just kids anyway; they don’t need to see that. So in dealing with subsequent issues I just changed the image to a highly compressed image of black text on a white background saying to stop hotlinking.

The worst part, though, was having to search out a suitable gay porn image to use. I didn’t enjoy that one bit.

Here is the picture of Sephiroth that was hotlinked from my server. No, I’m not going to be posting the gay porn. I don’t think I have it anymore anyway.

Update 2007-02-14: Here’s a much better technical method to prevent image hotlinking, rather than dealing with it reactively only after you’ve realized the image is being hotlinked.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 19:41 and is filed under Net. Keywords: Tags: bandwidth stealing, gay porn, hotlinking, images, MySpace, Sephiroth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.