I host a VW bus web site, and have a gallery section where you can upload your own images. Apart from one or two pranksters, I hadn't had any problems in 4 years or so. (
http://vintagebus.com/gallery)
Recently, someone was uploading images that had *NOTHING* to do with buses at all. I removed the html stubs associated with the images, so they didn't show up in the gallery. They *KEPT* uploading more images, some the same, some similar. There were just a handful of networks from which these images were coming, so I wrote a trap to sideline those images.
But they still kept coming, even though the images were not appearing in the gallery. This seemed to be beyond a prank. So I looked thru my logs, and found that another side was linking to images on my server. Hmm. It's possible to set the web server up to prevent that, but I like to be able to give people a link to a specific image on my server, which I wouldn't be able to do. I don't think I can have it both ways.
Needless to say, I was a bit miffed. So, I decided to have a little fun. I replaced all of those images that they'd linked with new ones of my own choosing. I went for maximum shock value; hey, it's my b/w and h/w - tough noogies if you linked to content there. If you
really want the link, PM me.
I really hope this guy's mom visits his site; I really do.
I'm wondering now if this is a means of resource stealing which could be more prevalent than I thought. People have deep-linked since the beginning of the web, but with galleries such as this, they now have to deep-link to content they provide, and stick somoene else for the storage and bandwidth.
My next task is to clean up my gallery directories and actually remove the inappropriate images that aren't used.