Hotlinkers for Reagan

Hotlinking is the act of displaying an unauthorized image, video or other file on your own web page when is stored on another server, esp. without asking permission from the owner. It amounts to bandwidth theft from the hosting server.

My personal domain, gazpacho.net, was once the victim of a hotlinker. Somebody used an image on my site for his avatar in a forum hosted on a machine in Italy. I would not have minded if he made his own copy. But I didn't like seeing the traffic from his forum posts in my web log.

So I decided to teach him a lesson. I modified the .htaccess file on my web server to include the following lines:

RewriteEngine On
# Teach an Italian hotlinker a lesson by replacing our image with another
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.).*it/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpe?g|png|bmp)$ blog/archives/images/reaganrocks.jpg [L,NC]

Let me explain what the above entries do. It tells the web server that for any web server with an .it (Italy) domain that tries to link directly to any GIF, JPG, PNG or BMP file give the reaganrocks.jpg file instead.

So instead of the Black Label Society image the forum poster wanted, he saw an image of the greatest American president ever.

Posted at 7:44 PM