I just had someone report a PIBKAC, and it occurred to me that it might happen to others and they might get equally confused.

In order to prevent people from directly linking to the images on my server, I have set up access filtration based on referer URL. There is a specific whitelist of permitted referers, and if any other appears then my server sends a special graphics file that indicates that something is wrong. Here is the whitelist:

www.denbeste.nu
denbeste.nu
regulus.denbeste.nu
70.90.130.45
192.168.1.1
chizumatic.mee.nu

Other URLs will correctly access my sites, but will run afoul of this filtration and won't permit you to see image files.

The particular person who complained about this turned out to be using "www.chizumatic.mee.nu" and that's not on the list. So he didn't see the top rotation picture. Instead he saw my "bandwidth theft" PNG file

That is not a bug. That is how it is supposed to work. The instigation for doing this was one time when someone linked to one of my images from Fark and brought my server to its knees. But since then I've had an ongoing problem with the denizens of MySpace linking to my images. I eventually got fed up and created a very obnoxious 1024*2048 blinking GIF file, and started sending that instead. The goal was to cause the friends/readers of the MySpace denizen to complain so that the denizen would remove the link to me -- and it's worked. I get hardly any hits from there anymore. (Also, getting my image files removed from Google helped a lot.)

Anyway, if you see an ugly "bandwidth theft" image where the top rotation image should appear, the solution is for you to correct your bookmark.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 11:58 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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