Switcheroo: Reasons Not to Direct Link Images
Reason 25: Misery profiteers suck
Some ghoul on eBay is hawking those tasteless crappy World Trade Center-shaped candle holders that we made so much fun of right after The World Was Changed Forever (as TV journalists, who never change, keep telling us).
It's bad enough for this seller to be trying to profit from misery (not to mention by selling such a crappy and tasteless product, and promoting it with a garish, "Star Spangled Banner"-sound file playing, browser-crashing, image-heavy mess of a page)—but he is also helping himself to my bandwidth by hot-linking four images from my website.
The seller's handle is "Discovering New Deals"—probably some down-&-out Roosevelt nephew. If his New Deals are anything like his uncle's, they won't turn out to be deals at all.
He's got a Javascript that rotates my images. Aww. How kind of him. How shall I thank him?
I know! I'll spiff up the images for him—you know, tailor them to his business niche:
Below are all the images now rotating in an endless loop on his auction page:
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Instead of this:
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This:
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Instead of this:
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This:
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Instead of this:
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This:
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And instead of this:
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This:
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Here they are, in situ:
Update, 25oct2007:
So the idiot finally caught on that instead of horrific images capitalizing on a human tragedy, his listing was displaying just plain horrific images of human tragedy. But instead of figuring out why the images had been switched, he went right back to my site and got the new image names, restoring his listing to its previous state.
Unacceptable.
So I switched the images again and his auction is once again displaying the second kind of horrific images. The originals are now named:
stop_hotlinking_or_next_time_you_get_the_goatse_01.jpg
stop_hotlinking_or_next_time_you_get_the_goatse_02.jpg
stop_hotlinking_or_next_time_you_get_the_goatse_04.jpg
stop_hotlinking_or_next_time_you_get_the_goatse_05.jpg
. . . which means that if he hotlinks the images again—you guess it quick boss!—he gets the goatse.
And so—we wait. While we're waiting, you can occupy your time gazing upon another crass 9/11-exploiting product from the same idiotic seller:
The seller offers the following item description:
Artist and entrepreneur—our brave little seller is two kinds of failure! They grow up so fast.
Above: Something the Bush administration still hasn't managed to find—Osama's backside.
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