Victory![1] I’ve been noticing that this blog has been attracting bandwidth thieves for some images hosted on zzzbot.com (particularly ones that happen to be on the first page of Google Image search results[2]). And the time has come to kick some ass among them.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if the bandwidth is what really concerns me, but it ticks me off that someone could be lazy enough to link to another site rather than to host an image themselves. And not because I believe that as an ethical matter you shouldn’t mooch from other people, but because you are opening yourself up to being exploited by them.

In short bandwidth theft(aka hotlinking) involves finding an image that you like on another site and directly placing its URL(its address) in your own site. This causes the image to be displayed in your site but downloaded from the server that hosts the site where you are ‘stealing’ the image from. Doing this saves the hotlinker from having to host the image themselves and generally makes life easier for them. But this laziness comes at a price. By hotlinking to another site you are, essentially, making real estate from your site available to the hotlinked site. If the site that you are linking to is savvy enough to detect the fraudulent image download it can substitute if for anything it wants and your site will happily display it. And this is just too good an opportunity to let by without having some fun with it.
Some sites ‘punish’ hotlinkers by displaying an image advertising the hotlinked site or an offensive image outing the hotlinker as a bandwidth thief. I prefer taking the satanic route.

If someone is going to give you the opportunity to mess with their site then why not do it properly and scare the bejeezuz out of them and their visitors? It’s both funny and effective. After looking around for a while I decided to use this approach, mainly because I could understand it. My weapon of choice is Tool – a genuinely, seriously hardcore esoteric metal band. The last track on their 10,000 days album is entitled Viginti Tres – a short garbled moan of horror whose lyrics contains no trace of irony.

I love Tool; they are one of the few bands that I know of who are really serious about their drugs[3] and their esoteric philosophies. And while I myself do not ascribe to their vision I do admire the integrity and dedication with which they pursue it[3]. Their music also rocks – explosive, cutting metal.

Back to the story. I had to frame the lyrics to Viginti Tres on a suitable canvas so set out to find the most evil album cover on the internet. And forget about the cheesy covers featuring blood-dripped skulls and slathering demons ripping humanoids apart – I mean really, really dark. In the end I settled on this, truly evil image from a combined metal album by Gestapo 666 and Satanic Warmaster.

Truly Evil

Finally I added some scrappy teenage shock horror(for that authentic edge) and some cheap advertising and compressed the whole thing into an ugly, grainy GIF. The result is this

The response has been immediate. The zzzbot.com logs show that within a few hours of redirecting moochers to this image at least one chick removed the hotlinked image from her MySpace profile. Shame, I hope she didn’t get too freaked out by my gentle hack; bless her soul.

To tell the truth I like the idea of being allowed to inject whatever I want into someone else’s site so much that I kinda hope that the hotlinks aren’t removed.

Update: 11 March 2008

After testing my bandwidth thief hater script on the thecages archives I have promoted it to the current thecages images as well. The result has been great! Several sites now sport my satanic message and in one particular case some poor fool used an image hosted by zzzbot.com as the background to their MySpace. The magnificent result of my defacement of Reddy‘s profile is preserved for posterity here. I wonder how long it will take him to notice it?