Adventures in Hotlinking: Part 3

Wednesday, January 26th, 2005
by Chris Short

Hotlinking according to altlab is:

Bandwidth theft or “hotlinking” is direct linking to a website’s files (images, video, etc.). An example would be using an <IMG> tag to display a JPEG image you found on someone else’s web page so it will appear on your own site, journal, weblog, forum posting, etc.

Not a day goes by without me checking to see if someone is hotlinking to files owned by Short Consulting clients or myself. I’d like to share some of the cases of hotlinking I’ve had to deal with in the past year.

Adventures in Hotlinking will be an ongoing series of articles about my experiences in dealing with bandwidth theft.

Hotlinking to SlapYoFaceOff Icons and Videos

A guy from London decided he was going to hotlink to videos and the icons that link to them on SlapYoFaceOff. I noticed this very quickly and went to the violator’s site. I discovered an incredibly ugly site with even worse grammar and misuse of the English language. It was one of those free web site hosting services so getting the content down shouldn’t have been too much of a problem just by contacting the hosting provider. But, I decided to contact the site owner himself via his guestbook. I wrote a demanding message (I feel no need to be nice to thieves). He replied to my demands with this lovely message:

Maybe you should look into this a little more seriously, I do not host the files on my server, I merely created a Hyper-Link linking them all to your site. If anything,you should be happy that I am promoting your site through mine. Go onto where it says “Download” on the slaps page and right click it, You see that the picture is not hosted on my site… it says: http://www.slapyofaceoff.com/images/icon-download.gif

If it where on my site it would be http://www.freewebs.com/billybobwithnotoes/icon-download.gif

It clearly isnt, I am just linking the videos towards your site. If there is anything we can arrange just email me via …

Needless to say this guy didn’t have a clue as to what he was doing wrong. But, then he had to put up a fight for his audience of friends with this message:

ok ok nuff of d neekiness get me, dis joke cant put nuffin on me i jus have links to his site, im not breahcing any copyright laws, so mr oaf, y dnt u get slap ur face off and slap yo momma ass off instead coz i aint got time 4 u man

Now you know what I mean by misuse of the English language. So first I had a guy that didn’t know any better which turned into a schmuck. I replied with this after he removed links to the infringing page (but didn’t delete the page):

Maybe you should find the definitions of hotlinking.

Also, all graphics on slapyofaceoff.com are property of slapyofaceoff.com’s owner(s) and can not be used elsewhere without consent.

You can try and be as hard as you want here but you know what the deal is.

A few of his friends decided to berate me with insults but I had no time for stupidity. He eventually replied that the page was gone but it wasn’t only the links to the page were removed. After a few more insults I decided to just report him to his hosting provider. The site is gone now and the account is frozen.