More hotlinking follies
I discovered today that some guy on Myspace was hotlinking one of my photos as the background for his page. That is pretty seriously lame. I’m kind of annoyed by hotlinking images, but I think it’s all right if you’re linking the picture to post it to a blog for discussion or some such. But to link it as the background to your page? Like my web server is a utility or something? So I added myspace.com to my blocked referrers list.
I mean really… If he wrote to me and asked if he could use the picture, I’d say sure, just make a copy of it. If he just made a copy of it without telling me, I’d probably never even know. But to just hotlink it? So he can use my bandwidth and server capacity that I pay for?
May 11th, 2005 at 6:42 pm
A little over a year ago, I had no earthly idea what hotlinking even WAS! Luckily I never did it by accident. (Although, it’s not really that easy to do, by accident, I mean.)
Anyways, you’re right. Ask, for goodness sake. And THEN steal it if they say no.
Some lady emailed me to ask if she could use the picture I took of my mother and grandmother holding hands right before she (grandmother) died. I said SURE! I thought it was very nice that she asked.
May 11th, 2005 at 7:33 pm
I think most of the idjits who hotlink have absolutely no idea that they’re doing something wrong, and in fact they’ve just about exhausted their technical capabilities by linking the picture at all and they felt a warm and fuzzy glow of accomplishment when it actually worked.
Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy substituting a picture of a particularly grotesque act of bestiality when I find someone’s doing it to me.
May 12th, 2005 at 1:12 pm
I found another guy today who was hotlinking one of my pictures and claiming that he took it himself. So I set up some .htaccess files to rewrite the URLs and redirect him to my ‘hotlinking is bad manners’ gif file.
May 12th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
Hotlinking has happened to me as well. Germans who liked my Teenies in Bikini’s pic. Pisses me off. I stole the pic from another page….couldn’t they have done the same?
May 12th, 2005 at 2:27 pm
Heh. Check out the new and improved hotlinkers’ pages:
http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=HaF_AzN_SaMuRaI
http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=2376807&Mytoken=20050510195436