Wazza,
I appreciate your comments. If I choose to have a picture of a poo, and just happen to name it loading.gif, is there anything wrong with that? It’s not like it’s illegal material which has an age restriction etc. It comes down to people not having any control over what people store on a remote server, therefore you should definitely not hotlink. No issues with the proxies, because I’ve changed the image URL that I use on my own site to something completely different. No risk of the incorrect image being displayed on my own site. I was originally thinking of redirecting the request elsewhere, but then I figured that would make me just as bad by ‘hotlinking’ to someone else. I agree about a 404 being more professional and less traffic, but I thought it was worth having a bit of fun with first. J Thanks, Nathan. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Wazzä Sent: Friday, 7 August 2009 10:57 a.m. To: [email protected] Subject: [phpug] Re: Hotlinking I'm surprised that still in this day and age, people are not just simply downloading and hosting themselves ... although I digress. Fair enough on the mindset however - the image you have chosen is quite possibly going to offend some people - the question is not of getting the image on the other server, but more of that fact that you are hosting the image on your own server. Is that the image you really what you want to present to the public at large? Also imagine the fun when the transparent proxy here displays the poo, instead of the spinning thingy. (Attica Group / Callplus have a transparent proxy). Thirdly, your poo is 10KB in size - the loading is 3KB in size. Who's going to hurt from the 3x increase in bandwidth requirement? It's a public internet site - the developer may already know ... Not directly, no - but I would suggest that you either redirect the traffic elsewhere (like a image from a google cache instead) or simply deny access to the images via the http headers. This would give a slightly more professionally way of dealing with this issue and also the added benefit of reducing your bandwidth (error message headers being < 3KB in size, generally). Lastly - the poo may actually encourage a DoS attack against you (byebye, bandwidth) - whereas a denial may have the same effect. My 2c/ Cheers, Wazza. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
