I’m not computer savy, and I read many references about “hotlinking” and “bandwith stealing”, especially here. I understand that these are the same thing (Am I right, by the way?).
So, how does it works? My question isn’t “how to steal bandwith?” (anyway such a thread would be quickly closed), but what happen when someone create a hotlink (as oposed to plainly steal a picture from another site and just post it on his own, which would be only copyright infringment)? What happens when I just look at the site of the thief containing the hotlinked elements? What happens when I decide to download them? Could you create a site in such a way that each time someone looks at it, someone else’s bandwidth is used, or does it works only when someone choose to copy/download the contents?
A webpage is basically a set of instructions that tells the browser what to show. A picture is actually instructions that tell the browser where the picture is located. Every time the picture is downloaded it uses bandwith. The browser does not care if the picture is located on a diffeent server than the rest of the webpage.
By using somebody a picture stored on another server on your webpage you are ‘hotlinking’ and everytime someone looks at your webpage you are using (IE - Stealing) someone elses bandwith. If you just stole the image and hosted it yourself you would use your own bandwith every time the picture was viewed.
What this is about is when people make a page that links to a file (often a graphic) on another page. When someone loads up page one, page one hits page two up for the file, each and every time. That adds a lot of bandwidth to page two, but the owner of page two isn’t getting anyone to come to his site. A lot of people (like bloggers or media companies, especially if they depend on ads) don’t like this. They’re paying for the bandwidth and they don’t want people sucking it up without even visiting. Bandwidth stealing is not, inasmuch as I know, illegal, its just rude.
If the owner of page one saves the file on his server instead, it doesn’t eat page two’s bandwidth. But that can be illegal. Some people set up blocks sdo if someone tries to see certain files (usually graphics) wihtout linking to the page its embedded in, they get some other graphic instead, like a warning not to steal bandwidth or something.
In addition to that some companies ban all kinds of hotlinking even by their own customers. “Free” ad sponsored services and cheap low-end webhosting services often rely on the fact that the vast majority of private websites are hardly ever viewed by anyone but the author and use very little bandwidth.
By hotlinking you can easily increase your used bandwidth a lot.
Just posting one larger picture to busy board can use more bandwidth than years of regular visitors to your vanity site.
Hotlinking is not illegal, but it may violate the terms of service of your webhosting service. If you steal bandwidth from another site, when the find out (and they will, if they know what they’re doing) they can send a complaint email to your webhosting service. And if your webhosting service is at all reputable, they will warn you and then cut you off if you don’t stop hotlinking.
I think you can do it by a “htaccess file”. You’ll need to google for instructions – its above my pay grade.
There are simplier, less effective ways, such as periodicly renaming your icons, change the code on your pages for the file name and deleting the old icon files.
This doesn’t stop new hotlinking but forcing those now doing it to code themselves.
People sometimes creates a new file under the old file name saying whatever, like “This image was stolen from (your website)”. Doesn’t really stop the theft but exposes the hotlinker.
My soon to be former host has software on the server allowing you to block hotlinking, and/or allow it from certain sites only (say, no one but posters to http://ezboard2832.ezboard.com can link pictures from your site to that site only).
You must be able to access statistics for the hits to your pages and images. See where people are coming from (check the “referer” stats). The clearest sign is if an image has referers coming from a page that’s not yours. So someone is linking directly to your picture, instead of the page it’s on.
From there, find the website that’s cheating you. You can send an email to the owner of the site and tell then to stop. It may just be some kid who doesn’t realize what he’s doing is wrong and will just stop if you say so. If talking to the cheat doesn’t work, contact their webhost provider (or ISP if it’s a home box). Most hosting services will take action if you complain.
I’ve been doing the other low-tech things that you mentioned, though I try to make it fun by substituting images (turn a picture of Julia Roberts into Saddam Hussein), changing images into free advertising for my site, or if someone really insists on continuing to stealing bandwidth despite the above, turn the image into a personal attack on the bandwidth bandit.
A fine real-world example happened to The Tech Report, an excellent online computer review and enthusiast website. A vendor called gotbyte.comstole an article the Tech Report had written, and even had the audacity to leave the article’s graphs on the TR server.
When Tech Report frontman Dr. Damage got wind of that, he extracted his pound of flesh by “slightly altering” the graphs. Scroll down to view the hilarious result:
This guy has an explanation of the procedure, as well as several examples of counter-pranking. A fun read. And a great site if you haven’t checked it out.
