Sayonara Hotlinkers

I’ve had it. People are hotlinking images from my site like crazy, using them (in full size no less) in forum postings and even as backgrounds for their own sites. They don’t even bother downloading the images in question, they just link directly to the files on my server.

Earlier I’ve replaced images that were hotlinked with other, not so nice, pictures. For those of you curious enough, google tubgirl and goatse.

Most of the hotlinked images reside on my old Gallery 1.x install, which has no real image protection scheme. I’ve since migrated to Gallery 2, but left my old install in place. So, step 1 now is to remove the old albums dir. That should stop most of the existing links out there, but I also want to be able serve “alternative” images to hotlinkers, if I feel like it. So, I hope to do a general rewite for all image files in the old albums location and feed them to a php script that determines what to do with it.

So, the sites looking at getting images replaced on their site right now are the following:

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Paul Thurrot blasts Microsoft and IE (+IE7)

Paul Thurrot news editor for www.windowsitpro.com has spoken out against Microsoft and the current development status of IE7….

XeroCool apparently apologizes

XeroCool has, to my knowledge, posted a small apology for ripping content from my site. I say apparently since he is still blocking me from viewing his site….

XeroCool not playing nice

http://xerocool.innereyes.com/bad_msn_bad.php and http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org/item/msncom-not-playing-nice. Compare the two, make up your own mind….

Where do we go from here?

I’ve recently started wondering why I do this? Why do I bother posting lots of random stuff here, and who cares? Looking at my logs, it actually seems like a lot of people care, for some reason or other….