“Hotlinking” (also called “hot linking”, “leeching”, and “bandwidth theft”) is a term referring to when a web page of one website owner is direct linking to the images or other multimedia files on the web host of another website owner (usually without permission, thus stealing bandwidth). This not only causes the other person to pay for the bandwidth of the hotlinked file, but often is intellectual property theft.
On my GFY page, on the rules and instructions page, it says very clearly the following:
DO NOT link directly to the images on my server; that uses up my bandwidth and really pisses me off. Save the image to your own server or use a text link. If you don’t know how to do either of those, do a Google search and figure it out. I’m not your Momma.
Imagine, then, my surprise when I looked at the “latest visitors” stats page provided by my control panel and found that hundreds of people were hotlinking images stored on my server. Imagine how surprised and pissed I was.
Now, if you’re one of the people who was hotlinking images on my server, imagine your shock and surprise when you look at your site and instead of seeing, say, this image:
you see the image my very creative, awesome, and funny husband made (you know – the husband who’s a geek, so he knows what the hell he’s doing):
Anyone hotlinking to any images on my site will be seeing the cat’s ass instead of what they meant to link from now on. Don’t hotlink my images, asshole.
As a special bonus, if you’re surfing around using Anonymizer or something similar, all you’re seeing where pictures should be are cat’s assholes. Sorry about that – but if we can’t see that the referring url is a page in bitchypoo.com, we have to assume that it’s someone hotlinking. I don’t know if you can log out of Anonymizer (or whatever) and come back in, but that might be the way for you to go.
(Hopefully you can still see the pictures I put up in my entries, though, since they’re hosted elsewhere.)
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After posting my entry and taking my shower yesterday, I got dressed and headed out to the grocery store to pick up the groceries we’d run out of since Fred got groceries Saturday morning. When I got home, I put away what I bought, and went back out to my Jeep to bring in the bird seed and Kitten Chow I’d bought at Target earlier.
(The Kitten Chow is what we give Meester Boogers, Miz Poo, and Spanky as a snack each night. They go crazy for it. And a bag of Kitten Chow is way cheaper than the tiny little pouches of cat treats you can buy.)
I looked out the back window to see if the bird feeders needed to be filled – of course they did, they ALWAYS need to be filled – and went into the garage to get my shoes. I was walking across the kitchen toward the back door when I heard a distant squealing sound. I stopped and listened, wondering if one of the cats was barfing up a hairball. Spanky stared toward the computer room/ library side of the house, and I heard the tell-tale sign of the cat door opening and slapping shut. The squealing sound got louder.
“Oh fuck!” I yelled, kicking off my shoes and running toward the cat door. As I reached the hallway that leads from the kitchen to the front door, Meester Boogers came into view, and in his jaws he held a young cardinal, who was squealing just like a little piggy.
SqueeSqueeSQUEESQUEE! the bird squealed.
“YOU FUCKER, PUT HIM DOWN! PUT HIM DOWN!” I bellowed at Meester Boogers, who took one look at me and hauled ass up the stairs.
“GODDAMNIT, YOU LITTLE SHITHEAD, PUT HIM DOWN!” I raced up the stairs directly behind Meester Boogers and the squealing cardinal. Once at the top of the stairs, Meester Boogers ran into my bedroom and turned to look at me.
“YOU LET HIM GO! LET HIM GO, YOU STUMPY LITTLE FUCKER!” I yelled, running at him, waving my arms wildly in the air.
Meester Boogers let the squealing cardinal go, whereupon the bird flew up into the air, tried to land on the trey ceiling on one side of the room, bounced off the ceiling, and then flew to the other side of the room to attempt a landing on the trey ceiling there. Meester Boogers jumped up on the bed and tracked the bird, once jumping up a few inches and flailing his front paws in the air.
“You BETTER NOT!” I warned him. There was a bookcase near where the bird was, and I hoped like hell he’d land on top of it so I could grab Meester Boogers, toss him out of the room, and try to figure out how to catch the bird.
The bird found he couldn’t land on the trey ceiling on that side of the room either, looked down at Meester Boogers, let out a warning squawk, and then flew into the window. Stunned, he landed on the floor, and Meester Boogers jumped off the bed and ran over.
“GET YOUR ASS AWAY FROM HIM!” I yelled in my deep, scary Mean Momma voice. He looked up at me, decided I was serious, and jumped from the floor to the top of the chair so he could supervise.
“It’s okay,” I said to the bird in the comforting
I won’t hurt you voice I use with the cats at the pet store.
Squealie the Bird didn’t seem comforted. I reached down and picked him up gently, whereupon he began squealing again. From his position atop the chair, Meester Boogers reached out a paw to smack at the bird, but his arm wasn’t long enough.
“It’s okayyyyy,” I crooned to the bird, who repayed my kindness by sinking his beak into the tender area between my thumb and forefinger.
THOSE FUCKERS BITE MIGHTY FUCKING HARD, LET ME TELL YOU.
“OWWW!” I shrieked. “GODDAMN that hurts!” I pulled my hand away from the bird, and when his neck could stretch no further, he let go of my skin. I repositioned my hand so that it was right under his neck, so he couldn’t bite me again, and I headed for the door. Meester Bastard Boogers followed me as I went down the stairs with the squealing bird and opened the back door. As soon as the back door was open I held open my hand, and the bird flew off across the yard into the tree.
“Well, I hope he’s okay, you stumpy little bastard,” I said to Meester Boogers. “That was bad. I know it’s instinct and all that shit, but that was still bad.”
“Mrrr!” Meester Boogers grunted. He looked up at me with wide eyes. To his chin was stuck a small feather.
He’s a stumpy little bastard, but he sure is cute. Good thing for him, I guess.
* * *
It’s that time again. Yes, yes it is… I’m tired of my ‘do and want to do something different. I’m thinking of growing it out and styling it like
Renee‘s (that’s Renee of Renee and Patrick, the first couple on
Things I Hate About You!). I can’t decide, though. I’m about three weeks past due to have my hair colored and need to make an appointment, I guess.
I promise you, if I could find a clipper set with a 2-inch attachment, I’d just shave it all off. I would! (We actually have a clipper set with a 1-inch attachment, but I don’t want to go quite that short)
Hmm. That’s an idea for a fund-raiser – I could try to raise money for the cat shelter I volunteer for, and if I make my goal by a certain date, I’d shave my hair to 2 inches long. I wonder if anyone would go for that?
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“What?”]]>
Poor birdie. But I gotta say I’m impressed by the Stump’s hunting prowess. He probably thinks you put out the bird food as bait. Heh.
I can hear Beans taunting “Gotta love me, I’m the baby” over and over. Every time my two youngest cats get into trouble, I keep repeating “Gotta love me, I’m the baby!” to myself. It makes me laugh everytime.
I love the cat’s ass place-holders! However, I’m seeing them down the buttons on the sidebar, too, even though I do not using any sort of anonymizer. I do use Google Toolbar, but I wouldn’t think that would be the problem. MS XP SP2, maybe?
Kate: I swear, in the next house we’re going to have a front lawn big enough to put the bird feeders on, instead of the back yard, so that Stumpy little bastard can’t get to the babies!
If you’re not using an anonymizer, I’m not sure what the problem is – I may just have to take down the pictures in the sidebar and replace those with text ’til I figure out the problem. 🙂
This comment is for ” “, from above:
You’re probably seeing the asspics because I set up the server to block images for people who block their referrer, in addition to people who hotlink. My guess would be that either the Google toolbar or your browser is doing that.
I locked it down tight. 🙂
SO have you watched Growing up Gotti yet?
Bah, hotlinking sucks. There’s no excuse for it – none. There are tons of sites online that will host pictures, even large pictures, for free, such as http://www.imageshack.us/
I would LOVE to see the look on someone’s face when they go to their website and see the asshole pic in place of whatever they were hotlinking… *snigger*
i was always curious to see how it is that you can figure out that people are stealing your bandwith – can you tell me how you guys sleuthed that out?
I’m amazed the cardinal let you pick it up! He must have been pretty friggin stunned.
Do you still have those couches?
Poor baby cardinal! Thanks for rescuing him from the jaws of Meester Boogers.
How come Spot doesn’t get kitten chow as a treat at night too?
girlwonder – my control panel has a “web/ftp stats” option, and when I click that, it gives me another list of options (webalizer, analog); one of those options is “latest visitors”, and when I pick that, I get a list of the latest visitors (you probably figured that out!) along with interesting information such as the referer and the url of images viewed on that referer – I figured out that they were stealing bandwidth because the image was on my site, but the referer was on another site. (I hope that made sense – but I fear it didn’t!)
Susan – Yeah, he was pretty stunned, but I’m sure that given another second or two he would have been in flight again. And yeah, we still have those couches – they’re holding up pretty well, too, though I occasionally miss our old overstuffed couches.
Margaret – I only regret that I didn’t get a picture of him, because he was cuuuuuuuute.
Elizabeth in NC – because he doesn’t like treats, oddly enough. He will occasionally beg for food at the table and we’ll give him a small piece of whatever we’re eating – but he usually won’t eat that, either. He’s an odd duck, that one.
Absolutely great entry (Funny! Funny! Funny!) from someone that doesn’t take any shit from leechers and hungry cats.
Wow… I’m just coming down from laughing my head off. This is why I read you the five days you write. Robyn, you are the Queen of online journalers. All hail the Queen!
Hey, I have the exact same countertop you do. I love mine!
So. Many. Cat. Holes . . .
I’m seeing all kinds of holes. Make the holes go away. Take away the holes. My eyes…MY EYES!!
Seriously. I’m looking at hundreds of cat holes. I’m not using anonymizer. I AIN’T hotlinkin’. . .
Willie Ray – thanks! 🙂
Mo – can you send me a screen shot?
Ergh, this entry reminded me about an incident that happened this past winter (without the kitty of though- that would just be the cherry on top). We have windows in the corner of our living room that are about four feet wide by eight feet tall that meet at the corner- huge huge huge for apartments around here. Means we get tons of light, but the place gets hot and considering how close our neighbors are, it feels like we’re living in a fishbowl. So until I get up and about, the windows in the living room are usually open, but the blinds are down. With me so far? Well, one morning this spring, I wake up to the sounds of frantic screeching and banging. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from and why it was so loud. I go into the living room and it’s in the damn house! A bird is stuck between the window and the blinds and it’s quite far away from the actual window opening. He can see lawn and he’s trying to get to it. I called my husband, crying hysterically and he thought I was going to have to go to the hospital for a panic attack and he was going to have to deal with the bird, dead or not, when he got home. Then he said to call the substitute resident manager if I could find his number. So I got off the phone, went in the other room to calm down for a minute, then grabbed a dishcloth, opened the blinds, let him calm down- which totally didn’t work, because he was as hysterical as I was so he made one more attempt to launch himself at the window. So I grabbed him in the dishcloth, held him out the window and opened the cloth. He flew away with no problem. Dumbass bird.
Funny thing is that my old landlord, who is like Queen of the Gardeners is terrified of birds. Like Hitchcock scared of birds. So her garden plans have to take into account stuff that will attract too many birds. After I got the stupid thing out of the house I called Jamie and said “It’s gone. Good thing I’m not Marge though, because then we’d have to move.”
I always thought that having a bird fly in your house is bad luck. It wasn’t fun though, that’s for sure- we’ve only had one in this apartment, but we’ve had others that just fly in and out again. I hate it because I’m always afraid they’ll bang into something and die.
Jeez I’m never getting a cat. I couldn’t handle that bullshit all the time.
Hmmm…i have Alot to learn. I don’t even understand what hotlinking is. Even after someone tried to explain it to me i don’t think i quite understand. Anyway, i can see the pictures just fine! lol
Robyn, Why not get a collar put a bell on it for the your kitty and that way he won’t be able to sneak on the birds. They will hear him coming and have time to escape. My neighbor did it with her cat when I was growing up and it worked wonders! Good luck!
Robyn!! If you are going to let your cats in the backyard please do not have bird feeders out there, you are “setting them up” for the kill!! :(((((
Jen, A bird lover….
People are so lame, cheap and lazy…
How hard is it to just save the GFY picture if you “must” have it and use it as a graphic on your web site?
Robert
Man,I am SO glad that the pic on your website opening page was of a CAT’S arse ! It was blurry on my pc and I was taken aback wondering when your site had turned into some sort of nasty assmaster site ! (WHEW!)
Good for you catching that bird! I have about SIXTY birds and boy,catching them is my LEAST fav job !
Hey Robyn – Norton Firewall messes with your images now too. Dancing cat arseholes all over the place! I have had the same problem with dooce.com, but with less arseholes. (The pics not showing, in case you got distracted.) In the end I set up a SPECIAL RULE just for you (er, and dooce) in the firewall to permit all images, or allow you as a referrer, or something. All I know is I had to get the bunghole off my screen.
…no offense to the bunghole’s owner, of course.
It looks like you’ve cut off the rss syndication feed to LiveJournal, too. Was the bandwidth getting to be too much?
Denise – No, that wasn’t on purpose. I’m going to have to try to figure that out, too. 🙂