Kablooza

One of the most annoying things on the internet is to see that some idiot had decided to Google for an image and has decided to take the direct link and place it directly into their forum signature or something similar. It seems harmless doesn’t it? It certainly seems to be that way BUT it isn’t! This action is usually referred to as hotlinking. By hotlinking, you are actually using up the owner’s bandwidth every time the image is loaded. This doesn’t always apply to images though but on most cases it is. So the next time you decide to grab an easy image off Google remember, save it your hard drive then upload it to a free image host such as Photobucket or ImageShack. You should actually check if there are any copyright laws for the images but that’s a whole different story.

There are various ways to actually stop people hotlinking.

• If you feel like being evil, you can simply replace the image they’ve hotlinked with another image; one they wouldn’t really like. This will completely ruin their hotlink.
• Another way is using .htaccess. A good tutorial on how to stop bandwidth thieves using this method can be found here.

There are probably other ways to stop them but these two seem to be the most effective.

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