Tech: How to prevent image leeching (hot linking) in IIS 6.0

One of the most annoying things about hosting your own web site is that some people will take advantage of your web server serving up images and other content to any browser that requests them, even if the browser is displaying a page somewhere else on the internet.

By not hosting the images themselves, leeches save both disk space and bandwidth. It’s called leeching, image stealing, hot linking, hijacking and just plain stealing.

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Screen Capers with Copy Scrapers (sploggers)

The online world is dominated by search engines and internet portals. The three biggest, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live, determine what content a site has by using software robots to surf the web and “crawl” (like a spider) for content. The spider reads the content of the website (the words or copy that you write) and returns it to the search engine for processing. When a web user comes along they type in keywords and get a list of search results based on the data the software robots have retrieved for the search engine. Read more