Russians

Mr. Krushchev said we will hotlink you
I don't subscribe to this point of view
It would be such an ignorant thing to do
If you don't want ehowton after you.

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Was notified yesterday that downloads were spiking on the server which hosts my images and my other various files. Without looking, I knew the Russians had struck again!

The last time this happened, I found my various mp3's on Russian "hosting sites" where they built entire databases out of my music and made them readily available for download. No worries, I moved them all into another directory and put in a 'no spidering' file. That had worked relatively well...until yesterday. At something like 2500 downloads alone for Mark Ronson's "Ooh Wee" (which I had downloaded for schpydurx several years ago) on a single day, it was time for action.

I knew what my top hotlinked images were, I'd researched it before. But this time, it was too much. I ran across several sites which provided code to set hotlinked images as desktop wallpaper and as web page backgrounds. HOTLINKED! A business, who does all their hosting on another's servers. So...I renamed them, made my changes, and swapped out the various pictures for this bowel-clenching one:

*** NSFW *** OMG ITS HORRIBLE - I BEESECH YOU - DO NOT CLICK! ***

I know I could've simply removed the image, but I don't think that's a punitive enough sentence for hotlinking. Hotlinking is rude. What I have done, well...it may change the landscape of hotlinking forever, and isn't that worth just a little short-term bandwidth? Especially since these images were on official sites like the Apple Support Forum, political/journalistic sites, and digg.com. I must admit, thinking of that image splayed across computer screens everywhere as their background wallpaper and/or myspace backgrounds makes me giggle almost uncontrollably. Is that wrong?

The Red Scare is over!

Also, they've somehow wised up, and were listing my soundtracks and scores which were in zip, tar, rar, bzip2, and 7z format and had indexed those as well - despite my obfuscated naming conventions! I removed every song and tarball out of the web accessible directory. Potentially, I could crash the entire Eastern hemisphere's music sharing service. I'll be lauded a hero.

A little more humorously, I found this picture of me standing in front of my Back to the Future pshop'd Tiburon on a forum in the Netherlands and a picture of schpydurx's cuntface on the humor-in-pictures web forum http://www.b3ta.com/talk/5909784 (link is work safe).

I'm out to change the world today.