Hotlinking Fun

January 10th, 2009

One of the downsides of having images on your site is that it is very easy for other people to link to them instead of hosting it on their own website.

I have found time after time, a referrer that keeps popping up in my logs. Today I had a look who they were and what they were doing.

It turns out that some company/blog where hotlinking one of my Twitter images, not even bothering to host it on their free Blogger site. So, seeing as I can change the image to whatever I want and it reflects on their site, I had some fun:

Before

After

You can see the site by clicking here. I wonder how long it will take them to notice.

Category: General

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Ricky Chotai

haha that is awesome!

nabiy

that is funny :)

Web Templates

In the 2004 Presidential election on of the candidates was actually hotlinking one of our images. Boy was it tempting to replace the graphic with their competitors ;-) I resisted the urge but did send the webmaster a note. It baffles me as to why people would try to save on bandwidth by hotlinking when they lose control.

Sam

That's made my day!

Rami Taibah

haha Matt,

I am always weary of hotlinking, I basically do it only with Wikipedia pictures and Flickr. But these guys just got pwned! And the best part is that they still didn't notice

Matt

I don't even think they will notice! What gets me is that Blogger accounts allow photo storage using Picasa.

ColinBowen

That is very, very funny.

I think I would have made it clearer to the average reader what had been done, and that the image was a replacement for the one they were linking to, and added a date so the longer was there the more stupid they would seem.

But then again, I should learn from you. Nice one!

Andy Lax

Hi Matt,

I suppose this falls under the parameters of "Don't get mad, get even." Let's hope the other webmaster does notice if only to fully learn the lesson and refrain from "borrowing" images in the future.

At least in this situation, you have some quick recourse. I'm still uncertain about what to do when webmasters 'borrow" content from my articles.

Data

that's real smart!

Data.

Jonathan

It's still there. Awesome. :)

Daily Bits of Furniture

Hahaa.. that's looks nice. I wonder how could you do that? I guess you did that by manually replace the original Twitter image with the other image with the same filename. Or is there any technique which is automated? Thanks

John

that is funny :)

chainsaw

Why don't you make the image an advertisement for your own blog or website.
Instead of a "pay back" it could be a "pay day" for you.

Rafaat

lol, great going. I used to hotlink some images in my blog - I wont be risking that now....:P
btw- "Phew! That's the other respectful disclaimer done! :)" ......niiiicccceeee :D