Am I being sarcastic? MOI? Nahhh … you know I would never stoop to such a thing … *cough*

In the last month, I’ve become aware that I have a huge bandwidth drain on my blog … a few web sites in China have linked to my music files, offering music “on tap” for anyone who wants to listen … a search engine will bring up the requested song, and play it. Those of you who are renting a server know that bandwidth is at a real premium … you can sometimes get unlimited storage, but the bandwidth is more difficult to find, and more expensive to purchase in large quantities. These web sites are using very little in the way of their own bandwidth - or even HD space - since they’re linking to other sites and stealing theirs! That would be like me going into your garden, stealing your sweet corn, and selling it in my virtual shop! You’re paying for the land to grow the crop on, and you’re doing the work and taking the time to grow the crop, and I’m getting the benefit! My Chinese friends cost me more than 3 GIGS in bandwidth in September, up from 350 Megs in August.

And then are there those who have spots on MySpace who hard link to the graphics here. If they only get a few hits a day, then unless they’re linked to something really large, they’re not stealing much bandwidth … but when there are a couple dozen of these moochers, and some of them get a few hundred hits a day, it starts to add up!

I started by putting all of my photos and music inside of robots.txt protected directories, although I realized that the stuff already being cached on the search engines was going to continue to give me trouble. I renamed all of the songs and graphics that were being stolen, and used “IP Deny” to keep some of the Chinese blogsites from returning to my blog and just searching for the new song names and directories.

It was moderately effective, however, I still wasn’t having any fun …

That’s where TJ comes in … in a recent comment, TJ from Dogs Cats Kids Life said:

Concerning bandwidth, maybe this will help…

One of my blogging friends has had people steal bandwidth from him in the past.

The way he deals with it is that he replaces the image/content that they are stealing with something that is either embarassing or blatant. He says that sometimes he just has the words on the page: “This website is illegally using someone else’s bandwidth” or “This site is stealing bandwidth”. He says the more shocking it is (like a picture) the faster they take it down.

Oh yeah! Now that sounded like a bit more fun …

I created a graphic and renamed it for each of the hard linked graphics … so now, all of those people on MySpace - and in those forums - who hard linked to my graphics are seeing the following little picture instead of the one they linked to (and so are their readers!):

To see a sample of this lovely little study in red, white and blue, take a look at this MySpace blog which was linking to a picture on my blog and using it as a background! >;o)

The graphics were small potatoes, though. The music is another story. I’m tackling that one in a couple of stages, actually. I made a recording which accuses the web site of stealing, and then gives the dictionary definition of the verb “to steal.” Those who are still getting through are now hearing my recording instead of the song. Most people don’t bother playing it through … they hear the “This web site is stealing bandwidth” message, and click it off. I’m hoping that this will embarrass the sites into removing the links completely. If it doesn’t work, I’m going to make a shorter, less polite recording next month. *evil grin*

Here’s a sample of what my Chinese friends are getting instead of Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up” …

Do I forgive all of these numbies? Of course I do … but forgiveness does not equal stupidity! Forgiveness does not mean that I help them continue to steal from me!

It’s becoming apparent that the internet is bringing out the greed in a lot of people … it’s not just the little MySpace sillies who link to a graphic someplace, not thinking that they and the 100 other people doing the same thing are causing the owner some grief; rather it’s the big music web sites that are linking to songs, and the places like Bitacle which are using your blogs like cash cows, that really need to be stopped. If we don’t pull together and fight these guys, I predict a pandemic of this sort of thing - just like what we’re experiencing with email and comment spam …

Hey! It’s time to take the internet back!!!

Posted: Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 4:21 pm under: Spammers & Thieves, Technomatics. Comment Feed (RSS 2.0). Interact: Comment or Trackback.