hotlinking (update 2)
Published Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 7:09 pm
Didi Bethurum, User Experience Program Manager for Windows marketplace, has aplogized for hotlinking to an image on my sever and the way it “screwed [me] up”. Honestly it didn’t screw me up; besides it gave me something to blog about. It just threw my statistics off for a few days. Yesterday, I had 1180 requests (26% of my byte traffic for that day, see image below) coming from http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmarketplace/ but not a single page viewed by these users. This is a give away that someone is hotlinking.
But more then being considered rude and causing possible financial impacts to small web providers that can’t keep up with the traffic (my sever was fine) hotlinking put can put Didi’s company (Microsoft) at risk. What if instead of just adding a short message and URL to the image I replaced the image with a vulgar or insulting image. Didi’s blog (unlike mine) is a professional blog; it is meant to show her company in a good light. It could be pretty embarasing for her and her company. Hopefully this will hopefully prevent some further embarrassment down the road.