while being a firm believer in a little paranoi myself, it may not be deliberate so much as careless or at least apathetic. a friend of mine who's an artist had the same problem, some idiot high schooler liked one of his drawings, and linked to it in an online game as the "image" of his character, and he had burstable bandwidth and had to pay for the excess (though the moron involved did eventually apologize, but didn't bother offering to pay for the bandwidth...).
i would suspect in your case, that some clown on ebay is linking to a jpg or other content on your site in thier ads and creating huge bandwidth that way. there are morons on ebay, consider the number of people who try to put up a 500k+ graphic in thier listing when 10k would do. they could be linking to anything on your site, graphics, descriptions, drivers or other software, whatever. for a stop gap, i'd pull everything down and change all the file names (maybe adding a character to the end, so it's only painful rather than nearly impossible...), and while that's going on and afterwards put up replacements for the original graphics etc. with nasty-grams, like "pay for your own bandwidth mutha" or whatever, who ever is doing it needs a good whack to the head and some physical education, or as near as one can come through the net (sadly "behavior modification" is all that works with some people). if it's an ebay lister, it should hurt thier auctions and get thier attention, quickly. as much as i love your site, the other option is to just pull it down temporarily, hope it stops and then put it up, but i'd definately contact earthlink and/or try the nasty-gram approach first. i wish i had webspace to offer, perhaps someone on list with a well managed site with better audit tools could host it for a while and allow you to point to it, thus maintaining the service and possibly finding out more about what's going on. in any case, i'd definately let earthlink know there's a problem, they may have tools to figure it out, or they may be as worthless as my isp (soon to change). i hope to run a website eventually, and this should let us all know the importance of looking at a provider and thier policies on "burstable" bandwidth limits, cost, and audit tools available to the web master (some can provide a lot of info on visitors and what they look at, others nothing more than what most isp's offer). in gamba's case, just knowing the ip or ip range the assault is comming from would possibly allow blocking that range, or provide a way to contact the offender and thier provider. if it is an ebay lister, it would be a good way to find out who even though the actuall downloads would be by those browsing the ads. hell, it could even be someone who's innocently mis-typed a link on thier own site accidentally pulling in stuff from yours (or deliberatly enhancing thier content by stealing yours, and your' bandwidth). i'd definately, definately contact earthlink and see if they can help, they "should" have the tools, hopefully. please do keep us posted. if it is deliberate, earthlink "should" be interested in finding out who and stopping them. it certainly could be someone with a grudge or other problem. > From: Gamba <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Sabotage: how do they do it? > > Somebody has figured out a way to sabotage my website.. > Earthlink has a 1000 MB per month traffic limit, which if exceeded before > end of month causes site to be disconnected by earthlink until 1st of next > month. -- Philip Stortz--"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms."-- Thomas Jefferson, Draft Virginia Constitution, June 1776 from <www.rkba.org> I'd encourage all to actually read the constitution and Bill Of Rights. -- Compact Macs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/>. Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Compact Macs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/compact.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/compact.macs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
