# "My graphics were hijacked"—no, you stole them. (Trivial webmaster rant) **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [February 4, 2004, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-graphics-were-hijacked-no-you-stole-them-trivial-webmaster-rant/227432 "2004-02-04T03:33:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2004, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-graphics-were-hijacked-no-you-stole-them-trivial-webmaster-rant/227432/21 "2004-02-04T17:12:39Z")
> [@Q.E.D.](#): > > Your account will have a logfile on the server, and possibly a nice viewer to make sorting through all the information easier. This logfile has all the URLs that were accessed on your website, the IP adresses that acessed them, and any URLs those pages were called from. If you see a bunch of accesses of “myphoto.gif” from “[www.thiefurl.com](http://www.thiefurl.com)”, you can be pretty sure that someone at thiefurl is hotlinking to that image. Got it! Many thanks. I’ll make sure i have some porn standing by for deployment, although i will be nice enough to warn them first that they should stop hogging my bandwidth. ---
**Author:** ![friedo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8edcca/32.png) [@friedo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/friedo)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2004, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-graphics-were-hijacked-no-you-stole-them-trivial-webmaster-rant/227432/22 "2004-02-04T17:21:21Z")
> [@Urban Ranger](#): > > You _patched_ Apache? > > You know about the GPL license, right? Course I do. But Apache isn’t GPLed. And the GPL only requires releasing code when you distribute the derived work. But my pr0n-grabbing patch is out there somewhere. I can’t find it though. Anyway, here’s a [much cooler one](http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=apache-httpd-dev&m=106352327003791&w=2) I did a while ago for Apache 2.0. ---
**Author:** ![yosemite](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/3ab097/32.png) [@yosemite](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yosemite)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2004, 6:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-graphics-were-hijacked-no-you-stole-them-trivial-webmaster-rant/227432/23 "2004-02-04T18:30:52Z")
Elmwood, that is hilarious. I had something similar happen to me. The guy on the forum was quite outraged at first (I had replaced the photo he stole with a graphic that said he was a bandwidth thief). He was puzzled by what had happened to his cute little avatar and cried, “But I’m not a theif!” until someone else on the board set him straight. > [@cuauhtemoc](#): > > t’s not like they hacked his server or anything. All they did was fix it so that anyone who tried to leech their bandwidth in this way would be served a different picture from what they were expecting. They’re under no obligation to host pictures at all, let alone host them for complete strangers who won’t spring for their own webspace. Oh, I totally agree. I am quite annoyed by bandwidth thieves—especially when my websites have BIG NOTICES saying that I don’t want people to use my graphics. One site in particular has text in **bold lettering** telling people to not leech my bandwidth. And yet they do it anyway. I feel no sympathy if they get embarrassed. However, as pissed as I get by these leeches, I wouldn’t replace the pictures with “maximum offensiveness” porn pictures. Usually a graphic declaring that they are a big stinking thief (or the NAMBLA graphic, saying that they molest children and steal graphics) is good enough. One time I had a _church_ site leech my graphics. I wrote to the webmaster and asked for them to be removed. No reply back, no apology, but one of the graphics was removed. Just one. Then I wrote to the email address of the _pastor_ of the church, explaining what bandwidth theft was, explaining how it is leeching my resources and explaining how I’d already asked for the graphics to be removed and the webmaster had not complied. I got a very polite email back from the pastor saying that it “would be taken care of immediately” and it definitely was! ---
**Author:** ![MarkofT](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@MarkofT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MarkofT)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2004, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-graphics-were-hijacked-no-you-stole-them-trivial-webmaster-rant/227432/24 "2004-02-04T18:55:02Z")
More stories from the frontling of the bandwidth wars are available on [Cockeyed.com](http://www.cockeyed.com/pranks/imposter/imposter.html). ---
**Author:** ![elmwood](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmwood/32/3060_2.png) [@elmwood](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elmwood)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2004, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-graphics-were-hijacked-no-you-stole-them-trivial-webmaster-rant/227432/25 "2004-02-04T22:30:08Z")
[elmwood has more fun with bandwidth thieves](http://specmaster.proboards21.com/index.cgi). Sure, the little graphics they were hotlinking to were only a few hundred bytes, as opposed to the 14K image it gor replaced with. Still, though … I like the results. ---
**Author:** ![yosemite](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/3ab097/32.png) [@yosemite](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yosemite)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2004, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-graphics-were-hijacked-no-you-stole-them-trivial-webmaster-rant/227432/26 "2004-02-05T00:47:19Z")
elmwood, that’s a thing of beauty. One time I replaced a stolen graphic (I think it was on someone’s blog—blog users are _big_ bandwidth hogs) with one that was invisible and really, really, really long. Like one pixel high by 2500 pixels wide. So it totally screwed up their table and everyone had to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll sideways on the page. And yet the graphic was transparent so if the blog owner was clueless (as I think he or she was), then they wouldn’t know how to fix it so easily. Another time a blog owner linked to one of my drawings and claimed that their “cousin in Budapest” did the drawing and that this cousin was famous and all that. I never understood the reasoning behind that bit of thievery. I can’t believe for a second that they mistook my artwork for their cousin’s. I have no clue what was going on there. Anyway, I replaced the “cousin’s” drawing with a big graphic that said that basically this person was a bandwidth-stealing moron and I wasn’t their cousin and what the hell? ---
**Author:** ![Fear\_Itself](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fear_itself/32/19637_2.png) [@Fear\_Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fear_Itself)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2004, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-graphics-were-hijacked-no-you-stole-them-trivial-webmaster-rant/227432/27 "2004-02-05T13:20:16Z")
When this happens in an ebay auction, I replaced the stolen graphic with a notice that the first 10 bidders will receive a 25% rebate on their bid, plus free shipping! ---
**Author:** ![GaryM](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/garym/32/241_2.png) [@GaryM](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GaryM)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2004, 3:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-graphics-were-hijacked-no-you-stole-them-trivial-webmaster-rant/227432/28 "2004-02-05T15:21:54Z")
> [@Fear Itself](#): > > When this happens in an ebay auction, I replaced the stolen graphic with a notice that the first 10 bidders will receive a 25% rebate on their bid, plus free shipping! Hence your user name, right? That’s a good punishment. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-graphics-were-hijacked-no-you-stole-them-trivial-webmaster-rant/227432.md?page=1)