Neil's News

Bandwidth Thief

30 March 2002

Some 15 year old kid in Germany chose to use one of the images on my website as his personal logo on a popular bulletin board system. Instead of copying the image, he simply linked straight to my copy, leaving me to pay for his bandwidth. I don't think so.

Several thousand hits later, the stats report brings this to my attention. A few lines of mod_rewrite code fixes the problem in a delightfully evil manner. This image is what he wanted to display next to his name on every message. This image is what actually gets served when attempting the theft. I wonder how long it will take for him to notice. [Update: It took him four days. Did he learn from this? No, he simply stole someone else's image. And a couple of days later they shut him down too.]

I'm tempted to quote from blinkenlights^[?].

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