[thelist] hotlinking, nice or nasty.. retaliation?

[David Dorward]

On Thursday, Oct 16, 2003, at 10:30 Europe/London, John C Bullas wrote:
>>> I investigated the 404 you've sent. One of our members is trying to 
>>> hot-link
>>> to a Kate Bush picture residing on your server. Unfortuntately 
>>> he/she has
>>> done this including a space in the end, so it results in a 404 in 
>>> your logs.
>>> Hot-linking to images on different servers is one of the features
>>> Friends4All.nl offers in order to tell something about yourself, 
>>> your life
>>> or other interests.
>
> So that's ok then is it?
>
> What should I change the photo of Kate Bush to? <grin>
>
I find that a 2-bit PNG image of some text saying something along the 
lines of "The owner of this site is trying to steal an image from 
another site. Email them to complain about their bad behavior" works 
well and needs very little bandwidth.

Or if you can find a way to send a broken image file that would crash 
common browsers... >:)

http://www.allmyfaqs.com/faq.pl?Prevent_bandwidth_theft has some 
mod_rewrite magic that might help.