Warning: techy stuff ahead. Non-geeks may get glazed look and fall asleep.
For months now, bandwidth thieves have been “borrowing” images from my site for use on their own site or bulletin boards. Today I decided to do something about it. I installed an .htaccess file in my images directory.
As you may know, you can use an .htaccess file to block people from using images that are hosted on your server. You can also use it to replace images with another image of your choice. Some people have suggested using a naughty image for this, so that the thief’s site would then become littered with nekkid people. But I’m not that mean. Also, my hosting service provider wisely prohibits pornographic images on this server.
Instead, I made a simple animated GIF that alternates between solid yellow and solid magenta. Anyone stealing my images will now have a site full of irritating flashing squares. Hmm. Maybe I should reduce the rate of the flashing — I don’t want to induce seizures.
Here’s a sample from the Google cache, just to give you a taste.