Referer Blocking

I've had to do something I didn't want to do -- referer blocking for images.

If I've done it right (and my tests seem to be working okay), you can view images just fine from my site, or by browsing directly to them (or with a browser that never sends Referer). You can't, however, by embedding them in another page, or by linking directly to them.

C'mon, people -- either use your own bandwidth, or give me some readers. Don't take the bandwidth without giving any indication it's not yours. And certainly don't be so rude as to steal my bandwidth by embedding images in fora I don't even have permission to read. (I'm looking at you, off-topic.net)

2003-04-24 18:52:00 | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) | Meta

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Comments

bacchus

I’ve been getting a lot of the credit-less image hotlinks lately. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what to do about it. Philosophically speaking, an object on the internet that’s not linkable is broken, so I hate to implement hot-link “protection.”

2003-04-25 00:13:00

Todd Larason

I even agree with you that this is broken, and I hate doing it — but I was seeing well over 50% of my bandwidth going to serving images on someone else’s site.

And I’ll admit, it pissed me off that I couldn’t even go see what it was being used for.

The story’s still linkable, and I went out of my way to make sure that it still worked with empty referers, so people can download the pics with wget and the like to serve them back up. And hopefully I’ll be able to turn it back off in a day or three.

2003-04-25 00:29:00

bacchus

50%? Ouch. Mine have mostly been minor leaches.

I will confess that, a couple of times, I’ve simply renamed my images, changed the links, and substituted an outrageous image for the original. But that’s not ideal, it’s a pain to do, and there are issues with things like the google cache which make it possible to shoot myself in the foot that way.

2003-04-25 11:32:00

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