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Hotlinking. The act of displaying pictures or content on your site directly from another persons webhost without their permission and stealing bandwidth in the process. This is a most uncool act which is often accompanied with blatant plagiarism of the posts or articles word for word.
It is also downright stupid.
Any newbie can save images and put it somewhere else as not to arouse suspicion that what ever you're displaying is stolen property. It takes a complete retard to actually take every single picture and display it by linking it directly from the owner's site. That's like stealing shoes from a store then selling next door to the shop you stole it from.
How catatonically moronic can you get?
You know what the sad thing is?
It happens more than you think.
So for those of you who happen to have webhosts of your own and you wouldn't want this to happen…or you found out that this happened to you, have no fear. There is a way to deal with them. However, it involves some coding and webhosts that has something called Mod Rewrite which is found in Apache run servers.
I'll try to keep this as simple as possible so here goes.
- Go here
- Read
- Do exactly what it says
I do hope that was simple enough for you. If you're a Wordpress user, this step is pretty simple enough, if you go to Admin ->Manage -> Files, you can find your htaccess file ready to edit. If your site doesn't have one, you need to create a notepad file with the commands in it and upload it into the server then rename it ".htaccess". If you got any questions on how to really do it or you can't figure out how to make heads or tails of it, you can drop by a comment here or contact me here.
But for those of you who want to know what this can really do. This is what I did with it. I took a site that was hotlinking of this post here. As you can compare…it's a direct copy.
Nasty.
Much better.
I didn't have to change the picture file names…all I had to do was edit the .htaccess file a bit and there you have it. Instant gratification. No fuss, no mess but certainly a lot of laughs.
So what are you waiting for? Protect your blog if you can. Don't let anyone else take what's rightfully your own creation…unless you took it from someone else then that would make it really stupid. But seriously. Do the right thing.
It'll be worth it.
If not for a few laughs.
Update: As this post was written, Minishorts whose posts were plagiarised and hotlinked thought it would be better to let the pictures be at the idiots blog. Her reasoning is, she has the support of people anyway which makes sense.
Update: I have also found two other blogs who have had the same problem and have dealt with the situation similarly. They can be found here and here.
Update: The site in question has been taken down already…permanently I hope. I do hope the person isn't stupid enough to do the same thing again. Then again, one can only hope.
3 Trackback and Pingbacks: »
[...] Minishorts had her articles plagarised, so with some help, she changed the hotlinked photos. [...]
[...] Minishorts had her articles plagarised, so with some help, she changed the hotlinked photos. [...]
[...] Who holds the rights? Today, I was in class and as the class came to an end, this was something that I reflected upon.Not too long ago, I was asked this question during a blogger meet-up."Since I contribute articles to this particular editorial, do I reserve the right to use back what I wrote elsewhere?" The question here arises, as the company that I had contributed to had not made me sign any kind of contract stating that they hold the rights to it. So, what is what now?The advice given was by my classmates was, I should contact that editor of that particular editorial and get it down in black and white.This happens as, one of my classmates had made a powerpoint presentation, (she presented it in class), and we wanted to make a copy of it. However, she told us that it was not possible, with the reason that she had already "sold the rights" away to this company who used it on their websites. She told us that if we wanted to see her work, she would give us the link to it when it was up, and we could make references to it (or something like that).So, technically, by letting us make photocopies of the presentation, it would be violating the company's rights to it. (or something like that).Plagiarism, or copying of work is a very serious issue in academic work. What more in the blogosphere....However, Malaysians, and a lot of Asians, have yet to catch the drift of that yet...... Intellectual property is still something that most of us are not too familiar with yet...Related links:Minishorts: What we hate most Kamigoroshi: Stop retards from stealing your images. [...]
19 People Said A Couple Of Things: »
that was a real good bitch slap back to that woman
*applaud loudly*
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I so do not want to get on your bad side. *shudder*
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It doesn’t always work though, I used to use .htaccess hotlink protection but sometimes it backfires, especially when people are using ISP wide HTTP caches/proxies, the images start showing up on your own site..
Mine re-wrote to the picture from goatse with FUCK YOU THIEF written across it (Yes I actually looked at the picture long enough to write on it), because loads of people were using my emoticons in forums all over the place.
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Muggly: Thank you thank you. Just doing my part to keep the peace.
Sotong: Haha…luckily, I’m very forgiving. But highly vindictive when I’ve reached my limit. So still very dangerous anyway.
Shaolin Tiger: The only other way is a cacheless refresh. Then again not many people are going to bother doing that too and if they have the picture in the cache as well, they won’t see the altered picture. That’s the only problem I’ve encountered so far.
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The idea of putting up the “I’m a shameless person bla bla bla bla” pictures was a good one man *thumbs up*
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Well what I really wanted to put up were naked dancing pictures…but since it wasn’t my blog to begin with. A little civility I guess.
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It was spot on man!
Btw, how do you source code protect eh?
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if i link a video/audio page, does it count as stealing bandwith oso?
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what people would do to impress when they don’t have a single impressive bone in their body. despicable.
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Mei: You can encrypt it. Or get scripts that protect source codes. It’s all online. Easy to find and use.
Sammie: Yes…it is. Hotlinking is an atrocious act. In fact, videos and audios from another site without permission is even worse.
Jax: It’s just sad. Too sad.
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gawd….my webbie was HORRIFYING!! *freaks*
hehe..its back to ok now *wheew*
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I agree with the concept of disabling hotlinking, but I’m not comfortable with hiding web page source code. That just goes against the spirit of online collaboration.
Thanks for htaccess guide link, though.
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Yeah, I mean…I learnt a lot from looking at source codes. Heck…it’s part of how Wordpress evolved. You just don’t rip the whole damn thing out.
Anyway, glad you can use the guide well.
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Hi. i made a link to this entry of yours.
Hope you don’t mind.
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hi i dont know what im doing at this site… i typed in ” images of retards” in the yahoo search but this is where it look me!!!! so if you know where i can find any pictures of retards let me know because me and my friend amber are doing and project in biology on retards! k thanks!
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Wow Thanks Edrei! Always wanted to know how to stop that hot-linking thing!
Btw, I used to chat with you on xfresh/hitz.fm haha.
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sorry. i’m a bit new. but how do you find other people hotlinking your images? i understand how to stop it once you’ve found it, but how do you find it in the first place? thanks for any help!
and well done on the above.
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The problem with using htaccess to block hotlinking is that it can cause your images not to display in web-based rss readers like newsgator, bloglines, etc. This can be especially problematic if you’re replacing the linked image with something “creative”, because you’ll be displaying that to legitimate readers of your content.
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