What’s hotlinking?  It’s when a website links directly to images hosted on my webserver.  That means that that website gets images on their site, and I pay for the bandwidth.

But… what happens if I delete that image off my webserver?  Or… change it to something else?  Muhahahaha… this gives me an idea.

I’ve knocked up the following image in a few minutes:

Any time anybody downloads anything off my website (darnkitty.com), it’s logged.  I can easily check the logs and see which websites are hotlinking to my images.  I’ve found that websites are only linking to two particular images on my server… a picture of a question mark, and a picture of the java icon.

Note… to avoid this problem, all a website has to do is download the image and then re-post it on their own server!

I’m going to replace the appropriate images on my website with the picture above.  That means that those sites that display my images are now going to show the image above!  Check here and you’ll see what I mean (when they notice, they’ll probably take them down, but they were there at the time of writing):

http://sushiwidget.blogspot.com/2009/01/belgian-weather-forecast.html
http://www.highspiritsclan.net=094f2e9873c80320dcaa490e0d9f4487
http://z3.invisionfree.com/The_Quidditch_Site/index.php
http://www.ljojol.com/vb/t14.html
http://www.seed-forum.com/viewtopic.php?p=795487
http://www.pcintv.com/forums/showthread.php?=&threadid=30995