I logged into CPanel this evening, which I haven't done in quite some time. We Munuvians have all these fantastic tools and toys available via CPanel, thanks to superhost Pixy Misa.

So I started poking around, confirming that I do indeed have access to PHP and MySQL here on Rocket Jones, and I got curious about the various stats counters and routines offered. Looking at the last 300 visitors, I quickly realized that a *lot* of people are hotlinking to my San Jose Sharks logo, and most of those bandwidth thieves are MySpacers. One bozo even hotlinked one of my graphics and was using it as his forum avatar, and this chucklehead was a prolific poster on some, ah, interesting, forums.

Luckily, we have hotlink prevention tools here at Munuviana, and I arranged it so all those dOOdz get the ol' red-X from her on. They're lucky I didn't redirect their links to something, ah, interesting.

Posted by: Ted at 08:02 PM | category: Square Pegs
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1 A couple of years ago, I noticed a lot of requests, on my personal server (which had quite limited bandwidth at the time), for a little jellyfish icon.
It seems some kid had put up a goofy page with incoherent text and a bunch of hotlinked images, many of which were Finding Nemo-related (my jellyfish wasn't).
I didn't get sophisticated; I just brute-force renamed my jellyfish icon, updated my links to it, and replaced it under its original name with a thumbnail of Ming the Merciless. It quite changed the effect of the kid's page, without actually being offensive.
I've subsequently added a 404 script that returns ol' Ming's glowering visage in response to some obvious hack attempts. It's such a useful image!

Posted by: Eric Wilner at April 16, 2006 09:21 AM (FBnz8)

2 I have had more than one instance of a MySpace user hotlinking to photographs in my photo gallery. The first one I discovered used one of my images as the background for her page. I decided to replace the photo with a graphic that read "you have hotlinked to a copyrighted image..." Then a few other MySpacers linked to other photos, and I've taken them off the server completely. Pretty soon I'm going to block all MySpace users. I feel like a mean old lady, but the proprietors of MySpace should inform its users that hotlinking to images is totally UNCOOL.

Off my soapbox now. :-)

Posted by: Cindy at April 17, 2006 09:14 AM (7aXDY)

3 I noticed that my hotlink to your MuNu button wasn't working for a short while. Thanks for letting me back in -- if that's what happened.

Posted by: Tuning Spork at April 17, 2006 10:50 PM (ZlOPi)

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