Bandwidth thieves

[annuin]

So PreZ sent me the link to some person's diaryland journal this afternoon. Not only did this person rip off several of the menu images from goth.net, they didn't even bother to host them on their own webspace. Not that that really makes it much better, as it's still copyright infringement, but stealing bandwidth just adds insult to injury.

So I've decided to swap the images out with something else. Clicky-clicky.

I'm following it up with a cease and desist email to the site host. They generally don't look too kindly on that sort of thing, and accounts can and do get pulled over it.

I'm also sending an email off to another person whose bandwidth and images she's stealing. Apparantly that copyright on his/her site didn't stop this girl from direct linking to his paintings either and using them as part of her layout.

Comments

[areina.livejournal.com]

I think it's bizarre how all her headings are about stealing images and bandwith.

[tanthe.livejournal.com]

That's because I got crafty in PhotoShop and changed the images she was linking to to those. So 'home02.gif' now links to one of those 'you are a bandwidth thief' buttons I made and I changed the goth.net menu buttons she was using to be other images.

Because she was literally using the www.goth.net/images/imagenamehere.extension in her code, rather than just plain old image theft, I was able to swap them out.

[areina.livejournal.com]

That's nifty.

[darktor.livejournal.com]

Isn't that more work then just stealing them? Why not just load them into one's folder if they;re going to steal it....and at least change the color or something.

[tanthe.livejournal.com]

If she'd just stolen them, then we'd probably not have found out (as easily) that she had them. Because she had them directly linked from our server they show up in webstats, and are easily trackable.

Shit like this is why a lot of hosts like geocities and angelfire and others have stopped allowing remote linking, because this is fairly common place behaviour. It can be a huge drain on a site host's bandwidth, and if you have to pay for bandwidth amounts used (rather than a fixed amount for unlimited usage) then you're kind of screwed by other sites using your bandwidth also.

[darktor.livejournal.com]

but why do it, cause then your site downloads slowly because it needs to go somewhere else to look up the images, and there's always the risk that somone will change or deleate the images.

[tanthe.livejournal.com]

Well, how fast it is depends on where they're linking the images from. If it's a fast server, and GN is relatively fast (or fast enough), then you wouldn't notice the extra loading time.

Other than that, I guess it's laziness. Also, if they have to pay for their bandwidth, any images that are hosted by another site mean that those at least aren't taxing their own bandwidth... so effectively they've gotten someone else to pay for part of their traffic.

I think in the next incarnation of goth.net I'm going to start running a html encoder along with stuff like 'no right click' and disabling text selection and the IE image toolbar.

[darktor.livejournal.com]

what time are you heading down today?

[tanthe.livejournal.com]

Later than I wanted to leave.

PreZ insisted we go to CompUSA to try and get my memory checked. We just got back from there. CompUSA doesn't have the equipment to test my kind of RAM, so they suggested a small computer store. Went there are were quoted $84 + tax just to test the memory (diagnostic testing they call it), so we just left. For $84 + tax we can pretty much buy new memory.

4.35pm now, hopefully we'll leave within the next 15 minutes.

[darktor.livejournal.com]

Cherie just told me they're doing something in the shop late tonight... I'd double check with her to see what's going on.

[varjosusi.livejournal.com]

ugh, no text selection? damn...I almost ALWAYS use text selection, force of habit after reading all the damn pages with almost no contrast I had to read for school years ago...

but if it keeps those fuckers from doing this again, I guess its worth it

[tanthe.livejournal.com]

Well, text selection would slow the ripping off of text from pages like the What is Goth? section.

I might leave that intact and just encrypt the html files instead, that will rule out a lot of the direct linking stuff.

[varjosusi.livejournal.com]

problem I've seen before, a page detailing how to get past that, going straight to source code (and thus no need to format it for another page with all the line breaks and such...and they can find the url for each picture through that...so...as long as its out there, its gonna be hell to keep people from copying if they really want to =\

[tanthe.livejournal.com]

Well, nothing is fool proof... you can remove the IE image toolbar option and add no-right-click, but looking at the source code will get you past that.

A basic scrambling of the html code so that it's unreadable to regular humans obviously wouldn't stop the most determined people either, but then it will stop the more clueless people out there, as no-right-click also does. And often they're the ones trying to rip your shit off.

PreZ also says there are ways to rig a cgi script so that you can get an image to load without revealing the image path, that also would discourage the average person.

No I'd not be able to stop it, but I can sure as hell try to make it hard for the average schmuck who's trying to steal images or direct link.