Woops

Awhile back, in February and March, when I was having trouble with websites in South Korea hijacking my server to serve images and videos they scraped with my content, I at first did what most webmasters who find their images hotlinked to some chatty forum with a billion hits per day. I replaced the image with another work of art.

I really wanted Homer showing his you-know-what to kiss, but I didn't want to cause an international incident, so I just replaced the image with a low-bandwidth, nasty message about stealing my bandwidth.

Then I discovered a much better solution. My server no longer fulfills requests for images from anywhere I don't specifically give it permission to.

So, I went back to the old file names for the replaced images, because they were much easier to remember. Unfortuantely, it never dawned on me that the copies on the server had more recent creation dates and wouldn't automatically get replaced.

Woops. Imagine my surprise when I found one of those messages appearing on Operation Doubles!

So, if you saw one, that's what happened. That was for my fans in Korea, so they'd know the website showing them this stuff was hijacking my server to do it.

As for the images: You can tell which ones are mine – mostly the court diagrams. If you are unsure, just ask. To reproduce my artwork, you need my permission, just as you need it to reproduce or translate any text on this site. But there is also a lot of clipart and some stuff in the public domain. Even if I have edited it to improve it, I don't care if you use it. But if I have improved it you should credit me with a link-back.

Don't even try to hotlink (hijack) any image from here though. I have fixed it so no one can. To put the brakes on skyrocketing bandwidth that wasn't due to legitimate traffic, I also started blocking a growing list of bots that seem to do nothing but eat bandwidth, steal content, and collect email addresses to spam. Plus a range of IP addresses from which fraudulent orders were coming.

Which brings me to a word for the wise. When lawbreaking and property-rights violations are winked at in a region so that it becomes commonplace there, it eventually has a bad effect on everyone living there. For example, there are online resellers who won't accept a credit-card payment from anyone in certain countries anymore, simply because the fraud rate is high there and the government does nothing about its citizens stealing from foreigners, in effect protecting them from prosecution for theft and fraud, so long as they steal only from foreigners. There seems to be a culture that believes it's OK to steal from "rich" Westerners.

But think twice: Businesses stay away from regions like that, adversely affecting the region's economy. Even a tiny one like me. Do I need the Bulgarian market? There are regions where every new website immediately gets put in the search engine sandbox, because 95% of the websites from that region are nothing but MFA spam. There are websites who have blocked access to whole nations, just because content, trademark and bandwidth theft from those areas is so rampant and done with impunity. That lawlessness hurts everyone living in that region. No one from there can access those websites or purchase anything but a knock-off; no one from there can use a credit card online; no one from there can get their business listed high in the search engine results. "Rule of law." Not just words.