I don't mind people linking to this site. What does that sentence have to do with stealing, or, indeed, with rhyming?

Rhyme this, bizznotch: if somebody hosts a blog and links to my site, I generally don't care. I do, however, care if it's of any interest to me. Likewise, I don't care if people whose sites I link to now and again know of my existence or not. Here's the money-shot though.

If somebody hosts a blog and posts a picture they've grabbed from my site, I don't care unless it's copyright protected. So far, none of the pictures I've posted are, so I don't care. They've saved a copy of the picture off my site, on theirs, and link to it. Fair play. The business is different when said hoster does not saves a copy of a picture off my blog, but links to it in a way so that it is displayed in a post on her/his blog. So what's the difference?

Well, if you think this will be a lesson in ethics and morale, you're as mistaken as those in New Orleans thinking they'll get help. There's a kicker in the end.

The difference is major in some cases. Most people who link to display others' pictures on their site waste no bandwidth of their own - instead, the person whose site hosts the picture is affected. People like me, who pay a company that hosts their site, usually pay for the bandwidth that's wasted every month. When a picture's retrieved from a server, that's a few KB's of bandwidth that's retrieved. Usually, this doesn't mean anything. But it's interesting, because you can do shit to the people who think they're saving bandwidth by letting you pay the bill.

Imagine a person linking to a picture of yours. Remember this old post of mine? Well, a few people who are politically oriented linked that picture to their blogs. To solve that problem I did an old switcharoo, so I renamed the picture-file and re-linked it. This meant their links pointed to hell. I even re-linked the picture that they linked to, so that their links pointed to a little picture of a demon that was hand-drawn by me. The last time I checked their blogs, nothing had changed. There you go.

So, now that a blog links to the John Bolton-picture for the umpteenth time, and that site is conservative? Let's just say their webmaster isn't very technically in check.

First, this is how the post that "stole" (and I put that word in quotation marks as I actually didn't protect my pictures from that happening) the picture looked like. I then enabled a little functionality called "hotlink protection". This means I don't let sites hotlink to certain types of files on my site any longer. I also enabled a function saying "hey, if somebody tries to jack my shizz, show them THIS picture instead". No, I didn't give them goatse, but a little textual message instead. Go ahead, click it, it's even safe to click if you're at work: here's what their post looked like afterwards.

I doubt if they'll ever notice it.