Hotlinkers of the World . . .

. . . you are in so much trouble . . .

Not that I think any of my regular readers would do such a thing, but there are many who would, and who do, and there are cyberfolk out there who don't know it's wrong. So please induge me on my rant.

First off let me explain what hotlinking is. In a nutshell, it's stealing someone else's bandwidth by linking directly to images (or other media files) on their site. It really pissed me off when I discovered someone in Russia and another in Japan not only using my images but linking to them directly. This is totally rude. Instead of stealing my bandwidth, they could be using one of the many places that will host images for free.

So, when I woke up at 4 am (I have been doing so much of this recently that it behooves me to learn how to take naps) I went into a tear about this and learned how to prevent it. Now if someone tries to link to an image they'll get my fierce watch-kitty.¹


And that should just nip it in the bud . . .

Time to go back to sleep.

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1. There is also the possibility that I will find my watch kitty on sites I've used to share images, so I suspect I'll have a bit of cleaning up to do. When one has been on a tear, this is often the case.