[vox] Content Sharing becomes Bandwidth Theft

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 06:20:19PM -0800, ME wrote:
> Something that was done ages ago by people upset with this kind of
> behavior was to reject all referring URL which are not from your own
> domain.
> 
> This causes people who use your bandwidth in this way to have icons which
> often do not work as expected. They must then decide if they want somehing
> that is broken for many people or something else.
> 
> With apache you can do some clever things with mod_rewrite, and it may be
> of some use here. You could possibly take cases where a referring URL is
> not from your site, and replace it with an image that says something like,
> "I am an image thief as I like to steal bandwidth." Then, when people use
> your images, their "presence" is one of a thief. :-)

I seem to recall Bill relating a story of having done this sort of
thing. But they had copied an entire layout over, so there were scads
of links to images on his server. They were completely mystified as to
how he was able to do that. ;-)

-Micah