Fun with bigots and thieves

I can abide a racist... and can even allow an anti-Semite his/her say.  But I have zero tolerance for a thief!

I know... I know... what the heck is David ranting about now?

For the uninitiated, there are two ways that a site-owner can place images on his/her website.

1.  The image is loaded onto the site-owner's host server and a line of code is placed on the page telling the web browser to call up that picture as it loads the page.

2.  The site-owner can place a line of code on his/her page telling the web browser to go find the image on someone else's server whenever that particular page is loaded.

The problem with option #2 is that it steals something called bandwidth*.  Every time a file is accessed from a remote server it uses up bandwidth.  As a blogger/journaler, I pay for a certain amount of storage space on my host's server... as well as a very finite amount of bandwidth (which I have been exceeding for the past 6 months or so).  If someone decides to steal my bandwidth by having my images load when their pages load... well, that's bandwidth theft.  It is unethical and just plain wrong!

Add to the mix a bandwidth thief who is also an outspoken anti-Israel/anti-Semitic racist... and, well... you can imagine I was a little hot under the collar.

As luck would have it, a few months back I read with amusement about my blogfather, Chuck's way of dealing with people who pilfer bandwidth.  He mentioned that this form of theft makes the thieves particularly vulnerable to a cute little bit of revenge.  You see, if the owner of the image were to replace the picture the thief is calling up with another, more, um, interesting image bearing the same file name as the original... this new picture will load whenever their page is viewed.

Just imagine the possibilities!

A couple of days ago I noticed that a picture I had posted on one of last month's entries was being accessed by another site. This kind of thing happens sometimes, but is usually due to ignorance rather than criminal intent.  But I was a bit shocked to find that the blog entry calling up this image was an anti-Israel/anti-Semitic rant by a jackbooted Brown Shirt student at UC Santa Barbara. 

I don't give people like that the benefit of the doubt.

The image I loaded to my server to replace the one he had glommed onto was essentially a warning label.  This is what showed up on his blog for about an hour yesterday (only much, much bigger):

What, you were expecting pr0n?  :-)

I'm sure my artistic wife could have designed me up something much more eye-grabbing, but she is not the vengeful sort... so I left her out of it. 

If you were one of the lucky people who followed the link that was posted here for about an hour yesterday, you probably saw what a bone-head this guy is... and hopefully had yourselves a little chuckle.  However, once this blogger saw the traffic spike and figured out what was going on he quickly pulled the image tag.   

I'm sorry I gave him any traffic at all since by all appearances his readership seems to consist mostly of the dorm rooms on either side of his own.

Yes, I probably stooped to the level of this bigoted bandwidth thief by playing this prank.  But theft is theft... and bigotry is bigotry.... and I decided to teach this eager young activist a lesson.   If you want to rant and rave about how immoral and criminal Israel's behavior is, you had better be Mr. Rogers-worthy squeaky-clean yourself!

Anyhoo, I know none of my readers would intentionally do anything dishonest.  But please be careful about using images... and above all, don't use OPB (Other People's Bandwidth).  It's not nice.

*Bandwidth: How much information (text, images, video, sound) can be sent through a connection. Usually measured in bits-per-second. A full page of text is about 16,000 bits. A fast modem can move approximately 15,000 bits in one second. Full-motion full-screen video requires about 10,000,000 bits-per-second, depending on compression. 

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