The 403 from HELL!

Hotlinking: The practice of inline linking to content on sites that you don't own or control.

Hotlinking is the web equivalent to spam. It is a resource hog and the costs are born by the content owner, not the cretin who made the hotlink.

• The easiest way to deal with hotlinking is to make the content unavailable by either moving or removing it from your server. The problem with this is that you may have a difficult time if you have a large amount of links to update.
• The nicest way would be to contact the offending site and ask them to remove the links. Unfortunately a significant number of sites are either uncaring of how this as an issue or just unresponsive.
• You can also contact the sites host/isp/bandwidth provider. They are likely to be more responsive if you can demonstrate damages that the site has generated. Log files would be useful here.

Then there is the Neurotoxin Internet Services way
NIS has an informal policy of redirecting hotlinked requests to "improved" material. In the past this has been the odd background sound or image; Nothing serious.
Then one of the sites I host had a whole lot of images hotlinked on a variety of discussion boards. Something had to be done.

Thus the 403 from HELL was born
This vicious little script was implemented to deal with the issue and the results were as hilarious as they were effective.
Simply put, this script redirects any hotlinked request to some of the "better" images from alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless with a banner put across the top and bottom of the image.

And for those of you who may feel that my response was out of line, keep this in mind. All I did was replace the images with others of a more extreme nature but of the category. PG-13 to NC-17/banned; that sort of thing.

The moral of this story is this: If you hotlink content or condone the practice, you play by the hotlinked sites rules, not your own. You have been warned.

One last thing, as a community service I offer use of the NIS 403 from HELL to any who wish to use it to prevent Hotlinking. WARNING! The images presented are of an extremely revolting nature, are intended to cause offense and should not be viewed by anyone under the age of 18.