Bandwith theft

By
Svein
– February 2, 2007Posted in: Sitenews

BeforeIt is never too late to learn something new.

I have not been paying too much attention to my logs lately, but reading an article online on web security made me take a look. And I discovered som incoming links that were very unfamiliar. So I decided to take a look and it turned out to be a hotlinked picture from an article about RSS Owl (a splashscreen that I had permission to use).

My first thought was to contact the author of the site. But this is an Arabic site and I do neither speak the language nor write it. Then I remembered an article I read at Eirikso.com about this and thought I would try something similar just to see if it was detected.

AfterI used a picture of George W. Bush and added a text about supporting him and USA. Then replaced the image. If the picture is still up, you can view it here.

So I will try to make an effort checking logs a little more often. Not that stealing bandwith this way means a lot, but I have to admit that the kid inside me got a little kick out of placing something like this on an Arabic website…

Update: Found another one linking to another picture. This one had not even bothered to use the size tags on the picture, so I used the same picture as in the former one, totally breaking the layout of the site. You can view the result here if it is still up.

About Svein

After living in Norway for over 40 years, I have moved to Brazil. I still sometimes travel to Norway to work, but aim at making those trips shorter and shorter. My worklife has been spent in the professional broadcast area. I have been doing regular production, both recorded and live shows. And I have been working for one of the major suppliers of editing systems, Avid Technology. The last few years I have done a lot of training and teaching. It is a very rewarding kind of work and no two days are the same. I also spend some time hacking together websites and tell people about the benefits of having websites with content management systems - CMS and lately also about the advantages of Linux. My preferred flavour is called Kubuntu.