stealing my images/bandwith
dhayn (179 points) | Wed, 2005-06-22 14:06Is there any way to stop people from posting an image that resides on my site on their own? I happened to see a bunch of hits for an image file on my site in my referring urls and when I checked it out there was my image in the middle of this guys page with no link to my site or having anything to do with me, he just wanted the image.
I only ask here because I'm on dreamhost now and maybe there is a setting somewhere you guys might know of.
In the meantime for this instance I guess i can just change the reference to the file in my page and delete it.
This is called hotlinking or leeching nowadays.
There's nothing particularly wrong with this, it's a big part of how the WWW was designed to work. However, it does "steal" the bandwidth of the original site, and could possibly infringe on a copyright.
To block sites from hotlinking to specific files of yours, you just need to make a .htaccess file with certain commands in it! Basically the file should look more or less like this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yourdomain.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yourdomain.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/stophotlinking.html [R,NC]
Use this site: http://www.htmlbasix.com/disablehotlinking.shtml to create a .htaccess file and upload it to the root directory.
I thought this was fascinating and implemented it on my site. I tested on a couple of machines that images remained visible when on the site, and were replaced when hotlinked onto another site that I own. Then today someone said they couldn't see the pictures on my own site. He was using Norton Firewall, which I also use. Any ideas?
www.beardsworth.co.uk
I think that can only happen if the firewall changes the referrers while browsing. Can you check if it does that?
I was just going to cover this topic at CG because I was having the same issue. I have several sites that I've given permission to reuse my content, but there are others out there that are simply sucking up bandwidth.
Get your fix of design software tips, tricks & commentary.
-----------
Visit The Graphic Mac for graphics and Mac OS tips, reviews, tutorials and discussion.
Personally, I don't see anything wrong with it
____________
work with pete!
If your webhost use the cPanel control panel software, there is an option for this built-in. I guess it does the same as the tip above, only it writes the "code" for you. I know dreamhost have their own control panel though - but it might be of help for others :)
Yes, change your reference to the image and then replace the image being leeched with something less tasteful - or a picture of a jester for example. They'll get the message at some point.
Actually, this probably not a good idea, and lowers you to the level of the mob.
yeah but its fun
thanks a lot, you guys have been very helpful.
maybe I'll just have some fun and change the image to something else to mess with this guy, it's on his personal blog.
Last time a friend tried putting a link in her AIM profile to a picture of her boyfriend I happened to have on my site, I liquified his face and bugged his eyes out, kind of looked like the joker from the old batman cartoons. It took a couple months before somebody ruined it and told her.
thats funny. can't you use javascript also to restrict right clicking (cntrl+click)? I found that on some sites to stop "save image as"
What does this button d.... CRAP!
Chris Brophy
Iklectek Designs
twitter
Mozilla/Firefox can block this behaviour.
hotlink protection keeps people from embedding images on your site into pages on theirs, it doesn't keep them from downloading your images. if they were downloading the image and re-uploading the images to their site, they would be in violation of copyright, not hotlinking.
as far as javascript and other "save as" prevention methods, they never work on all platforms. heck, i've yet to see a save as disabling javascript that works in safari at all. it's ultimately really silly because you *HAVE* to copy your image to their computer in order for them to see it at all - that's what web browsers do! so trying to restrict someone from saving a file on their computer to another location is dubious at best.
some sites such as flikr will embed the pictures in flash movies, which render them pretty much in accessible as a stand-alone graphic, but i have yet to see any protection scheme that beats a good old fashioned 'print screen' (cmd + shift + 3/4).
I was experiencing the same thing with someone leeching a lot of graphics so I changed the image to the guys name and pointed out what he was doing ....he was pretty quick to delete
www.afterglow.ie
afterglow.ie - Icons, interfaces, illustration
There is supposed to be a way that when you link to a file outside of the site that it will show up as a different picture like "I'm a bandwidth stealer" or something else would be said in the picture. I have no idea how they do it but have always wondered.
For now, I'd change the image to something completely off the wall. Teach them a lesson. If they keep using your images, I'd email them and tell them it's copyright infringement and to cease and desist. ;)
that's what ivan's .htaccess example (first comment) does.
copyright is the right to copy, that is to republish someone's work.
hotlinking is precisely NOT republishing your work, because the image remains on the original server where YOU published it. if they downloaded the image and reuploaded it to another location, THAT would be copyright infringement.
I had someone using one of my images and, more as a prank to him, and not being that upset I changed it to a large naked fat guy. Even just changing it to a picture of a cow or something would be funny and teach the offender a little lesson.
>:)
Well, I was going to come give insightful advice but it looks like all the good advice has been given, so I'll just share a funny story. In college, the apartment I was in offered high-speed access through a LAN and we would always browse through the unknowingly shared hard drives for mp3s, movies, incriminating photos... One time we found a guy who had his whole computer shared read/write. After pondering for a while how to inform him of his situation, I photoshopped up a nice "I have sex with goats" background with a warning that a "malicious" person might have done worse and instructions on how to unshare his hard drive. Moral to the story - Don't steal bandwidth... You could end up with an "I have sex with goats image", or worse, "a large naked fat gut". You don't want your visitors to see that.
Did you actually placed that background to his desktop somehow?
that's not actually related to hotlinking. but on windows machines if you have full reign of the hd, you can figure out what his current desktop image is and substitute your own (or you can edit the registry to point to whatever picture).
it was much easier pre-NT based systems tho.
Bringing back up an old topic here but when I changed my image to something asking the guy to take mine down he changed his image to the new one I was using. Some people...
Anyways going off of Ivan's suggestion I looked to see if dreamhost had a way to do this right in their panel. They don't but they have nice tutorial in their wiki that has a few different options in addition to Ivan's link:
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Preventing_image_%22hotlinking%22
Wow, what nerve. Did you get it worked out yet?