Stop! Thief!

If your site statistics have ever shown a single image getting an abnormally high number of hits, you’ve probably been “hotlinked.” This is where someone points to your image from another site. The image appears on their page, but the bandwidth costs go to you.

Now, I don’t generally care if someone wants to use one of my images for whatever, but at least have the decency to copy it to your own server.

Thankfully, there is this tutorial which explains how to use Apache’s Rewrite Engine to stop hotlinking. This is going to become a standard feature on our web sites.