Adventures in Hotlinking

Occasionally, I check hits to my site to see how people find it. Recently, I noticed a spike in hits to a photo I snapped of Mauna Loa in Hawaii. It looks like this:

A “stoner rock band” (either KYUSS or Sky Valley or a descendent of these) had decided to use my peaceful photo as their background for their MySpace page. Therefore, everyone who viewed their site used bandwidth on my site. I wrote asking them to kindly remove the photo. I received no response.

So I had the photo altered and uploaded with the same file name. The new Hawaii photo looked like this (go ahead, click to enlarge):

Here are a few screen captures immortalizing the moment:

User comment: "Thanks for making most other bands sound like pussies." Yeah!

Page views for this band jumped up by 21% in just under two hours. They should’ve thanked me, but instead, they panicked and deleted their profile. What I would’ve given to be there when they logged in (“Dude, we’ve been hacked!”).

Sky Valley, we hardly knew ye.

***

Another popular hotlinked photo on my site is one of Brian Jonestown Massacre singer Anton Newcombe. For more than a year, I’ve tolerated the many MySpace morons who don’t know how to save a photo onto their own computer; I decided it was time to give all of these people a new “Hero” and “Who[m] I’d like to meet.” Here's just a small sample:

From Anton...

To Adolf.

To date, only one person has noticed the change and removed the picture.