Internet dunces « Aleksander Skjæveland Larsen

7. November 2009

We all laugh in unison at the dunces of the internet. Usually they lack basic netiquette, and make themselves look terrible stupid. Like desperately trying to control a discussion by deleting fair comments on a blog or other websites, and disregard all reasonable critique. We can only facepalm when reading about musicians, artists and companies suing discussion forums, journalists and bloggers when they get bad press. Another kind of these dunces are those trying to use pictures they find when searching online.

If you find a picture you would like to use on another site, you are supposed to upload it to your own server or service. If you use the image directly you are hot-linking, which is bad practice. Every time someone browses your hot-linked site, you load the image directly from the source, hence stealing bandwidth. In many cases the source has to pay for the bandwidth used, so in some sense it is equal to stealing money. There are ways of protecting against this, but I have not bothered to set this up for two good reasons:

One: the bandwidth from my host is free
Two: it brings much joy and power

Joy and power? Yes, when people are hot-linking you can replace the original image with something horrible, giving you a direct impact on the thieving websites. Recently I discovered some sites hot-linking to the old Statoil logo featured in this post. I decided to replace the Statoil logo with a funny picture that would make no sense in the context. By doing this, I am having quite fun by slightly defacing another persons website. Also I am sending a signal that if I would, I could replace the image with something truly repulsive and disgusting.

Let us look at the bandits in question.

Bandit #1:
t1_a
after my image replacement:
t1_b