Year View| Saturday 31 July 2004 (Day View)

31.07.2004 – Saturday 31 July – Sleeping & Hotlink Protection

: • I slept. I then woke up. After that, I slept again, before waking again. I then analysed the logs from my amused site to try to figure out why I’d had one and a half gigabytes of a one hundred and eighty kilobyte MP3 downloaded in the past few days, and discovered that quite a lot of my content was being directly linked from other places. This inspired me to build a complex session based anti-hotlink script, which seems to work, although no one not allowing cookies will be served any images – including search bots. It’s simple in theory – if the user doesn’t have a valid session set by my site, it won’t serve them any directly requested files. If they try to access a file and don’t have a valid session set, it’ll return a “forbidden” header and log them. I’ll see how it goes. It’s already blocked a ton of people, and now that it’s logging, I can see who is trying to link to stuff.

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