Hi, all. Just a note to explain my current situation. You may remember that I dropped out of sight last month – it’s about to happen again, if it hasn’t already. I have been targeted by an Italian streaming video site (http://italia-film.com) who have hotlinked to whole bunch of my posters as the access to their videos, and they are slaughtering my bandwidth. I can’t block them directly because they’re just acting as a referral point for their visitors. However, I have put hotlink protection on everything with a “stop thief!’ notice, tried to block the site’s main IP, and also replaced the chief offender, my Zombi poster, with another theft warning. I can only hope this eventually forces them to cut me off. If anyone has any other ideas about how to fight this, please let me know!
I may say that I am astonished to learn how many people there are in the world who evidently have nothing else to do but watch Zombi…
Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
#1 by Naomi on June 14th, 2010
Bummer. I’m not sure how involved you are with the back-end administration part of your website, but this might be useful: http://altlab.com/htaccess_tutorial.html
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#2 by Mr. Rational on June 15th, 2010
Leave it to the Italians to copy everything.
#3 by Bryan on June 15th, 2010
Sorry for the suckage. I know little to nil about web stuff. Too bad you can’t just have an alternate image for them that has some tentacle porn, or some such.
#4 by KeithA on June 15th, 2010
could you put the images somewhere else, like flickr or some such service, so it’s their drain and not yours? Of course, then you have to change all your code. I still say a tactical strike is in order
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#5 by supersonic on June 16th, 2010
One may be forced to periodically move and rename all of one’s images, and update all the links to same.
I’ve only had to do this with one file at a time on my website… most recently, the MP3 of “Ninja Rap”… I’ve never had it happen wholesale.
One way it might be doable is to put all your images in a folder named e.g. “Posters_9234789783450″, and every few months or as needed, rename that folder to “Images_SLDKKWJHKJV” or something, and do a global search&replace to change all the links.
#6 by Ken on June 17th, 2010
Naomi #1 has the best mechanism. I would add that most hosting services provide a simplified interface, where all you have to do is select a directory (your root, naturally) and choose something like “only permit access from aycyas.com”.
If your host doesn’t support .htaccess, or doesn’t have a simplified interface, you might want to consider switching.
#7 by Carl on June 18th, 2010
You can refuse to serve images unless the Referer [sic] header is from aycyas.com. Many photo sites do this.
You can get the Italian site thrown off the net, too, by complaining to their ISP.
#8 by Andres Kievsky on June 23rd, 2010
What I do when something tries this on me is replace the offending image(s) with something disgusting – usually the image of a shock site, like lemonparty – or some hardcore gay porn.
I can assure you they don’t try it again after that