I received an email a couple of days ago from someone who thoughtfully noted that someone was stealing bandwidth from my by hotlinking to images in my /images directory. Effectively these people use your webserver to serve images for their websites. It’s tacky: kind of like filling your pockets with napkins and packets of ketchup when you go to a fast food restaurant. Any individual act is admittedly pretty trivial, but as of noon today, 546 images had been served to these people. Sigh.

A bit of research yielded a recipe for preventing this. Since I installed it a half hour ago, 46 further accesses have been routed to a banner image that will hopefully be less attractive.

All of my images are just a click away, but if you are going to swipe them, at least use your own bandwidth to distribute them.

Update: Two people have noted this broke reading from bloglines. I’ll fix it shortly.