Ebay Madness: Adventures in Hotlinking
I’ve been wishing for a new eBay madness for quite some time and I finally have a good one. This auction demonstrates two important things for a seller: 1. Use your own pictures. 2. Never hotlink your images. If you’re aren’t familiar with the concept, hotlinking is when someone posts an image somewhere on the web (usually a blog or on something like Myspace) and instead of hosting the image themselves, they “hotlink” it from another site. This can be pretty irritating to the person being linked as it is essentially stealing their bandwidth with little perceivable gain for the person being linked to. It’s also both lazy and self centered of the hotlinker. Here’s the top of the page for an eBay auction for a Marvel Mini-Mate (here’s the auction itself):
Warning: Kind of sort of Not Safe For Work
The best thing about hotlinking is that it is very easy to change the image and play a sort of a prank on the person who linked to you. In this instance, it’s an eBay auction. I don’t think the seller ever imagined they’d see this instead of the image of the Marvel mini-mate they wanted to sell:
As of writing this article the image still hasn’t changed. I wonder if the seller will even notice. I don’t think you could try to get worse PR than this.
Side note: As funny as this image is, it’s pretty tame compared to some of the ones I’ve pulled on hotlinkers. My favorite would have to be putting a horrific pornographic image in someone’s Myspace message to a friend. Ahh… good times.
August 12th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Oh my god, that’s fucking awesome!
I used to hotlink, back when I didn’t even understand the concept of bandwidth and that it could be stolen.
Now I save such images to my desk and upload them into an album at Photobucket set aside for nothing but such images.
I didn’t realize you could do things like the above. That is just fucking inspired.
August 13th, 2008 at 3:22 am
Superb.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:32 am
FOR VENGEANCE!