A moment ago, I have read an article from a blog that explain about hotlinking. People that practice hotlinking , called bandwidth theft. So, what the heck is hotlinking?

If you refer the definition from Wikipedia, they define hotlinking as "Inline linking (also known as hotlinking, leeching, piggy-backing, direct linking, offsite image grabs and bandwidth theft) is the use of a linked object, often an image, from one site into a web page belonging to a second site"

When we upload a picture from our blog the HTML code will be like this.

img src="picture.jpg"

But, if we are hotlinking a web site or blog the HTML code wil be like this :

img src="http://www.example.com/picture.jpg"

Usually people tend to steal the bandwidth by hotlinking image or multimedia content. By doing that the parent site will suffer for not enough bandwidth or limit exceed. If the bandwidth for a web site reached it’s limit browser viewing the error as "Bandwidth limit exceed".

limit

The owner of that web site and also the other visitor will not be able to surf the web. Do you know that hotlinking is a crime? it means you steal the bandwidth. Be careful, so check your image and make sure you’re hosting it on your own blog or free image hosting like imageshack.us or you can be sue for that. You can check whether you’re hotlinking and image or not with atlab tools at http://altlab.com/hotlinking.html.

I also worried if I ever hotlinking to other web image.. and i’m going to check all of my article and host it on my own. Need to do all over again.. It’s tired maa. Maybe I need to have an album after this. :) also it’s been a while since I’m writing post in English, so please don’t mind with grammatical error.

Are you hotlinking? If yes, congratulations you’re a theft now.. :)

Other References

Bandwidth Theft Is A Crime, Bandwidth Theft, Wikipedia

Locos 08

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