Bandwidth thieves

By | 2007-05-25

If you can read this, your browser cannot render “Scalable Vector Graphics”… get FIREFOX or OPERA
Some people love using Google Images for finding images to use in their blogs. And they use the absolute URL, which means: they show the image in their sites, but they use YOUR bandwidth. In the last few weeks I’ve discovered quite a lot of webpages that use images located at my domain.

Some days ago I detected one, and I changed the content of one stolen image (a Dali’s clock) to another thing (a gay bears picture), and started laughing: the thief put the clock image beside a text which says something like “it’s time to change”… what a change! :-D.

But due to the quantity of thieves, I decided to create a script to “scare” them. It’s a small .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://liopic.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.liopic.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.bloglines.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.google.es [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|png|jpg)$ http://valleylodgemusic.com/images/media/bears.jpg [R,NC]

Basically it verifies if the image is NOT referred from my site (or some usual RSS readers), redirecting the request to another place. The funny thing is that if the thieves use Google Images, they’ll see the correct image. But later, when they decide to add the absolute URL in their sites, the “change” takes place… (and sometimes they’ll not realize it because their browser will have cached the image, making more fun for the visitors).

Final tip: Don’t steal!!