Shed Your Head

Hotlinking for Knowlege

Posted by bronson Thu, 01 Jun 2006 15:26:00 GMT

One of the many problems with shared hosting is that you can’t watch your network traffic in realtime. You might find out about a good slashdotting only after you owe your hosting company a few thousand dollars in overage fees. You gotta be careful.

While glancing over my logs last night I noticed two small blips coming from http://sb-pyrat.livejournal.com/3982.html and http://profile.myspace.com/>>. Hellooo hotlinking bottom-feeders!

Of all of my fine and not-so-fine pics, the one that gets attention is this nightime shot of The Hamburger Habit in 2003.

Dave talked about hotlinking two years ago. Any time you’re linking pictures that you have no control over into your own pages, you’re taking a big risk. I think people do it only when they don’t know any better. Or when they’re just phenomenally stupid.

You should always copy the images that you usto your own site or use imageshack. Here’s why:

Hotlinking presents some random person (me, in this case) serious temptation to quietly slide a gigantic goatse.cx image into your site. It could happen at any time.

Hotlinking also gives some random person (again, me) full knowledge of your site’s traffic. I know how many people visit Midge’s myspace page, when they visit, and what their IP addresses are. The IP address tells me their school or company they belong to, what cities and countries they’re in, etc. This can be turned into valuable data.

Basically, hotlinking gives the hotlinkee a free web bug. If I were Midge’s jealous boyfriend, I could slip a picture onto her wall. I would then know whenever anybody looks at her myspace page. I’d monitor when she logs on, which of her friends visit, how often that sketchy guy from Philedalphea goes there, etc. If I were really jealous, I could use the zero-day exploit du jour to try to break into their computers.

This is actually a pretty serious privacy problem. I use two sites that allow others to leave content on my pages. Facebook doesn’t allow images on its walls so it’s safe. Skanky, spam-infested, buggy Myspace of course has this problem. I loathe Myspace. It’s the AOL for this decade. And you can bet that people are using this trick to keep track of their “friends”.

Now sb-pyrat and midge (yes, chelsea that posted the pic but it’s your wall), your sites aren’t busy enough to cause me worry. If the traffic goes up, though, the pic comes down. And next time, link to a smaller or tiny version of the image OK? That way, even if I do notice, I probably wouldn’t mind.

Wow, I miss the Habit. Tyson, we got plans for mid July.