Alden Bates' Weblog
Feigning normality since 1973
Time to get annoying (or, Why hotlinking is dangerous)
Filed in: Website Management.
A while back, someone on myspace.com hotlinked to the wee image on my Dead Can Dance page, a nice gothic picture of some arched windows. Since they were so kind as to use my bandwidth to decorate their profile page, I put in a redirection, so people see the somewhat nicer animated picture on the Spice Girls page instead, because everyone needs more Spice Girls. For some reason this person changed to hotlinking to another image on my site, so I redirected that one to the Spice Girls image too. They still have the Spice Girls picture on their profile, so they must be a fan after all.
But I grow bored. They didn't specify any width/height attributes when they hotlinked, so when the browser shows the page, it displays the graphic at full size. That means I can, say, redirect it to an image which is 5120 pixels wide and 1 pixel high, and suddenly their nice layout is alllllllll screwed up. But I wouldn't do that, would I? No, I'm a nice person... Oh, wait, I just did.
Bwahahahaha!
Posted September 28, 2005 6:38 PM
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You may recall I was previously having trouble with people on myspace hotlinking to my LJ icons like crazy. Previously I redirected the image requests from the hotlinking sites to a 5120-pixel-wide gif in order to mess up their layouts.... [Read More]
Tracked on January 31, 2006 6:36 PM
nice!!
I still think you should do it (also post here how!!)
Posted by: Glytch | September 29, 2005 12:27 AM