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PSA: bandwidth theft

Taking a short break from our usual satire and silliness, I’d like to point out this excellent article from the site wizard on how to prevent image bandwidth theft.

For those of you paying for your own bandwidth, there is an easy way to prevent people from stealing from you by linking images from your server. I don’t really object to people downloading an image they like from my site and posting it on their pages. I can live with that kind of theft. I do get upset when they use my server to display the image on THEIR site. That actually costs me money, particularly as The Skwib has gotten a little more popular and it comes up frequently in Google image searches.

Anyway, if you’ve got the same problem, follow the link above to find a simple solution. All you need is Notepad and ftp access to your server. The only problem is that it seems to disable viewing via Opera. I’d apologize for that, but people using Opera wouldn’t be able to see the apology anyway — they’ll just get a 412 error message.

Pig nuzzling antelopeNow, to return to silliness, here is a picture of a pig nuzzling an antelope:

4 Comments

  1. That explains a lot, I use opera and had wondered why some sites don’t show up, I do keep a copy of firefox around for just such things.

    That and I like the RSS feed in firefox.

  2. I think there’s a way to fix the settings in Opera so you don’t have the problem, and they mention something about it in the article. Sorry ’bout that! m.

  3. I have always been *very* careful not to hotlink images… But as a true “techno-tard” it is not always easy to know what you are doing right or wrong…

    I just didn’t post *any* images for the longest while…

  4. Yeah, I don’t necessarily see it as malicious, but it can eat up your bandwidth. m.

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