Kids These Days – Myspace Bandwidth
I just noticed that I’ve been donating gigabytes of free bandwidth per month to Myspace users. Apparently several of my eight megapixel uncompressed images are popular as wallpaper—also on Friendster and a similar site called “Hi5†that I’ve never heard of.
I hate to be mean, but:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} myspace.com|hi5.com|friendster.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !(rosi-kessel|bostoncoop|adamkessel|planet|aggregator|rawdog) [NC]
RewriteRule !sorry - [C]
RewriteRule .* sorry.png [L]
In reality, the content here is by default under a Creative Commons by-nc-nd license, but I’d like these people to realize they should at least check before copying images they find on the web. And if they are going to use images, they should copy rather than link them.
In my day, we knew about netiquette. Kids these days.
(I won’t embarrass these people by linking to them, but now there are several hundred Myspace, Friendster, and Hi5 pages that look terrible.)
Most popular backgrounds: Winter Sunset and November Foliage.
resiak Jan 28
I thought that MySpace pages looked terrible by design. :-)
Simon Farnsworth Jan 28
I don’t know if you intended to do this, or if it’s a mistake, but in the right hand bar of this blog, under the heading “LAST FEW FILMS:” I’m seeing a line of the “Sorry” image, split up by text like “Blood Simple”, “Il Postino”, “Capote” and more titles. Looks like you may need to check your server configuration.
Adam Rosi-Kessel Jan 28
Resiak: good point. I got a headache just looking at some of the sites incorporating my images.
Simon: Thanks for the heads up. Ironically, this very entry resulted in other images being blocked, because the word ‘myspace’ appears in my own URL! I’ve now adjusted my regexps appropriately to include the ‘.com’. If I knew how to do “grouping” with ands/ors for RewriteConds, that would be a better way to do it.
Steve Laniel Jan 28
You can’t just do something like
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (myspace.com)|(hi5.com)|(friendster.com) [etc.]?
Adam Rosi-Kessel Jan 28
You’re a genius, Steve Laniel! I’ve fixed the RewriteConds in my entry accordingly (see above).
Nico Jan 28
A few month ago I’ve set up a similar rule, but the linkers get a famous hello.jpg :)
Simon Farnsworth Jan 28
There’s one more RewriteCond that’s worth adding, to guarantee that people viewing via a direct link (e.g. in an e-mail), or who’ve configured their browsers to not send the referer header get to see your images:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^$
At the moment, because you’re blacklisting the worst abusers, you get this implicitly; you’ll need to add the test for an empty referer if you start just whitelisting (and it’s probably simpler for you to administer if it’s there already).
Simon Farnsworth Jan 28
Gah. I missed the ! on my condition. So, either change my suggestion to:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
or change the whitelist line to
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !(rosi-kessel|bostoncoop|adamkessel|planet|aggregator|rawdog|^$) [NC]