More news from Medgadget regarding those misbehavin' blog boyz, BlogBurst, who are apparently in cahoots with several of our nation's newspapers who ought to know better .. tsk, tsk.
Dear Blogger:
[The] Nation's leading newspapers continue to profiteer, together with BlogBurst service, from an intellectual capital produced by bloggers. In addition, they continue a shameful practice of hot-linking images from bloggers' servers. In essence, newspapers are stealing (!) other peoples' bandwidth.
Spread the message and let your readers know!
Thanks!
Editors
Medgadget
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For those really interested, a very respect tech website that deals purely with web issues has a great article on how to prevent hotlinking.
I've implemented this on my site and it works like a charm. You can link directly to image on my site, and you'll see the image written into an html page with a line giving me credit for it.
But if you take that same image and trying to hotlink it (put it in a post or on a site where it's getting pulled from my server), it won't work. The browser expects an image, but my server giving back a text/html page, so the image never shows up.
And this is the best part... Because the person stealing the image has visited my site, the image is stored in their cache. That means that when they hotlink it, they'll actually see it like everything's fine, unless they refresh their cache. So they won't even know it didn't work.
You can also make solutions that serve a big image that says hotlinking is bandwidth theft. That'll really make hotlinkers look bad. (Google the web for these types of solutions). The solution linked to above is for more elegant however.