STEALING BANDWIDTH

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Bandwidth theft, also known as hot linking, is similar to plugging an extension cord into the neighbor’s house and using it to power your electric heater so you get all the benefits while someone else pays all the bills.

Similarly, some people don’t bother storing images on their own website’s server. Instead, they’ll just link to an image being displayed on somebody else’s website. Although their website’s page still looks the same to a visitor, the other person’s web server does all the work of sending the image. That makes the host’s web server work harder, sometimes resulting in higher charges or even “bandwidth exceeded” problems for the host server, but not for the site hot linking to the files.

Bandwidth theft is fairly common on the Internet, whether through malice-or ignorance. However, it’s easy for a victim to detect pilferage from their website. Their server keeps a record of every file being dished up, as well as the website that requested it. When somebody sees another site draining one particular image, they not only know that they’ve become the latest bandwidth theft victim, but they also know the culprit. A quick visit to the offending site can confirm the problem.

People avoid this problem in several ways. Some quickly rename their own site’s hot-linked image to something else—image2.jpg, for instance—and then copy a porn file onto their server and give it the same name as their old image. The result is that when somebody visits the thief’s site, they no longer see the expected image—they see the embarrassing porn picture.

Note

Note If somebody’s hijacking an image on your website, and you want to fight back, replace one of your images with one of the many from the arsenal of offensive images available on the alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless newsgroup or from rotten.com (http://www.rotten.com), dedicated to collecting images that “present the viewer with a truly unpleasant experience.” Be forewarned.

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