Hotlinking is when a website embeds an image from your site into theirs. Everytime somebody loads their page, the image is actually being loaded from your host making it bandwidth theft. The only positive thing about having your images hotlinked by other sites is that once you find out about it, you can change the name of the image and put up whatever you desire to be shown on their site.
For example, when a christian site decides to steal bandwidth from me by hotlinking, I can do something like this:
Any questions?
Comments
34 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.11th Commandment (from God’s Digital Age Supplement) Thou shalt not hotlink lest ye feel the wrath of the heathen!
I just realized the photo in the top right (of the contributors, I presume) is not likely hosted by them as well…I have FF set to prevent off-site scripts and junk and didn’t see that pic when I went there.
Needless to say the one here didn’t load either until I clicked it.
Way classier than just tubgirl-ing them, too.
I think they used blogger to host that pic gorckat. Looks like the ones they are using in their posts are mostly hotlinked which is silly since blogger hosts photos for free.
Actually, to some xtians, Darwin is probably more offensive than goatse or tubgirl
lol remind me not to cross you
Tubgirl is smokin’.
LAWL!
Simply f**king awesome!
OK, unwashed masses want to know: what was the original image?
No, really, what a christian could have linked to on THIS site?
I guess he was reviewing Jesus Camp. I skimmed the review and it seems that he found the movie disturbing, but only as a movie not in practice.
Brilliant
he! holy crap that shit’s fun-nay
Nice one mate, next one gets the chimp headed roomba tho
They changed the link, but are just hotlinking from somewhere else now
Nice catch Cynical-C. I think you showed much restraint not to goatse their asses.
Chris, you do realize that the following website is being advertised, don’t you? For shame!
http://www.y-origins.com/?gclid=CLyk6NOTmIgCFQYiHgodRWlGYA
McGee, when did I ever say that I wasn’t a whore?
I posted a comment on “Apologize: The Existence of God”… hehe
To be fair, it’s effective bandwidth theft but probably not deliberate sabotage – more likely ignorance of how bandwidth works. I used to do the same thing till someone put me wise: I just thought it was a simpler way to get an image than copying it, saving it, uploading it etc.
Sometimes though, hotlinking is a good thing…two of my sites get a lot of free advertising through it (www.comiccovers.com and http://www.myconfinedspace.com) When people hotlink them in forums or on pages, my htaccess throws in a little watermark at the bottom of the image.
You can also set up your htaccess to either completely block hotlinking or selectively block it based on url.
Also, as a side note Chris, I didn’t notice when you moved over to wordpress, and only recently wondered why cynical-c wasn’t in my bloglines anymore…you may want to think about using feedburner so your rss feed is always the same (and you get nifty rss stats to boot!)
The site is back to normal now. They hotlinked it to http://news.softpedia.com/images/news2/039-Jesus-Camp-039-A-Documentary-About-Children-039-s-Indoctrination-2.jpg
I ratted them out to Softpedia. Does it make me a cynical rat bastard?
Adam, I’ve been using feedburner for 8 months now. I also did a post saying that the old rss feeds were going dead before moving to wordpress.
http://www.cynical-c.com/archives/005841.html
Outeast, I rename you, Killjoy the Great.
Friends.
I am the thief in question. Generally, Christians make terrible thieves, but given that my thievery was not even intended makes this event all the more anticlimactic. Seriously- I have been blogging for a year now, and I am an attorney, and your tirades are catching me very much by surprise. Unless you are referring to an Intellectual Property law on point that I did not hear about in my intellectual property courses, I am very much in the dark as to what the problem might be with “hot” linking to an image available over the public domain. The Jesus Camp image is available all over Google Images. I simply selected the first one I saw. Let me know what I should be doing to correct my sinnin’ ways in the blogosphere. Thanks and best-
MM,
When you take an image from somewhere, it is proper to download the image and host it on your site. You were simply embedding the image link from mine which means everytime somebody loads your page with the image from my host, I get charged for the bandwidth.
The problem isn’t the taking the image from a particular site, it’s that you aren’t hosting the image on your dime. I hope this clears that up.
Generally, Christians make terrible thieves
You are much too modest.
You can read a nice explanation on the wikipedia, here.
Leave it to an attorney to be unable to do a two minute google search to find out what the hell hotlinking means.
LOL Melissa,
Not only that, Chris explained what it was in the beginning of this post.
Chris, you should have goatse’d him!
How do you find out if someone is hotlinking from your site?
I do not find any reason to contribute and spread your ideas throughout internet. Your banwidth es excessively expensive, because you have nothing to give, and so I certainly will not hotlink to you.
Thanks
Hehe, I like the hotlink image. Must better than the goatse w/ a christmas tree I was using for a bit.
Hi, how do I know if I am being hotlinked?
I receive lots of visits from Google image search, particularly for two images I have stored at flickr.com, one of them made by ME.
Are they real visits? how do I know if someone is stealing my work?
Fernando, Look through your weblogs. If an IP address is requesting an image, but NOT requesting the webpage where the image is placed, then that person is hotlinking to your image.
Use .htaccess to not serve images unless the referrer is one of your web pages or your domain.
I just squished loads of MySpace hotlinkers the other day. It felt good to look at their sites with my artwork missing.
.htaccess rules!
Chris,
That’s hilarious. I’m glad you caught a screenshot of it to share with all.
…I keep getting so much traffic at my blog from this post that I had to visit again
Chris, you clearly have enough compatriots in your complaint to file some sort of class action against Google for providing an open grab bag for hot linkers. That could just be so exciting…