While surfing the internet for some interesting ideas for your next blog post or your myspace page (And I’m specifically looking at you in this instance), you see a cool image and think, I could use that. Without further thought you copy the image location and link to it from your site (so the image looks like its on your site). This is called Hotlinking (or bandwidth theft).
2 Reasons why you shouldn’t hotlink :
- The old switcheroo - Which is when the image you hotlink to is changed, sometimes for humorous results, sometimes not. Yes it can be amusing for the webmaster to change an image, but if the image violates your hosts policies it can offend your readers and get your site shut down.
- Violation of copyright - Possibly the more serious of the two. If you don’t own the rights or have the right to publish an image on your site, you can have legal proceedings against you which can be costly and again have your site shut down. By hotlinking you are also leading the site straight to you as it slaps a nice referal link in their stats.
So why am I so interested in hotlinking? Well some kind person from MySpace, with a popular profile, has decided to hotlink some of my images, this morning alone the image had over 2000 views, eating up my bandwidth and resources. I try to only use images I am allowed to use, for example stock images and images covered by the ‘fair use’ rules in the US.
If you are hotlinking my images, do me a favour and right click, save as, and upload the image to your site (This isn’t me giving permission to use the image, but if you are going to steal it, do it properly). I may in due course change all my images to get some nice free advertising on your site if you don’t >:)
I have a little surprize instore for me today when I came to visit my sites. I was greeted by the following message - Defaced by ka0x - D.O.M TEAM 2008.
After recoving from my initially shock I went to check what damage they had done. It wasn’t so bad, they had just replaced the index file, so was easily fixed, then I checked another of my sites and that was also the same, in fact almost every site I had was defaced. So I checked further and found that every site on my hosts server was in fact defaced.
Although that is bad, I felt better as the attack wasn’t specifically aimed at me and to give the hackers credit, they renamed my files instead of deleting them, which made it much easier to repair my sites.
Of course, its sunday, I had loads to get completed on my sites and got next to nothing done. For those who missed the hacked site, I have attached a screenshot below (You can click on it to get a readable version) 
I started up my computer this morning, waited for the usual updates, virus checks, etc.. Then opened thunderbird (my email client), and of course I got some new mail to read.
After searching through all the Penis enlargement emails, viagra emails, refinancing emails, free prizes and a nigerian minister who needs me to put $60million into my account for him. Oh not forgetting I won $1.5billion in a lottery I didn’t enter (not sure how to spend a billion dollars yet, I will wait till it arrives before spending it as im still waiting on the $11million I won last month).
Anyway, after I waded through those, I spotted an email with the subject ‘You Suck’ at first I thought maybe some russian woman who wants to find love was annoyed because I didnt reply to her last email, but no… It wasn’t. In fact it is my first piece of hate mail, its a special day for me as I haven’t received any before for Getburied.com. Basically, I suck because I don’t like Kate Nash and supposedly she is the best artist to grace this planet and I am just jealous (I posted about Kate Nash a while back, and her lack of talent).
I imagine you are all astounded at just how big GetBuried is getting, but that isn’t all, not only did I get that hate mail, I got another. Yes, thats right, two hate mails
I imagine lots of you are now planning to flood my mailbox with hate mails because your jealous that I received hate mail. If you do hate me that much, please please just post a comment instead, then everyone can read it.
Thanks for your support, see you next time 
… or is it Kate Hindley and Ian Doherty?
Kate Moss and Pete Doherty have been turned into the notorious moors murderers (Myra Hindley and Ian Brady) 
by Yorkshire-born artist, Russell Young. Images of the couple have be superimposed on the original image, or photo-shopped, if you want to use the correct term for messing around with other images.
The pictures were on display at the Art Fair in Islington, North London and now all four images have been sold allegedly for £28,000. The work is supposed to be an observation on the self-destructive hedonism of some of Britain’s biggest celebrities, personally I can’t decide who is worse, the artist who created this, or the idiot who bought it.
Even controversy should have its limits and If there are lines that probably should not be crossed, then this one has definately overstepped the mark.
