Bandwidth thief
Just in case you are easily amused, here’s the latest roundup of bandwidth theives.
The standard mischief in this case is to swap the picture on your server, renaming the original and changing your links to point to the new picture’s name. Rob does a pretty good demo of the prank. One of the finer points about the trick is to change the date of the file that you are going to substitute to something that?s earlier than the original picture. That way the original thief keeps reloading the original picture from his cache, instead of your substitute. This keeps the prank a secret from the thief for longer, but new site visitors get the prank image. Unfortunately I wasted an enormous amount of time last night trying to do just that. On my end, changing the date is pretty straightforward, but even when I had the settings correct on my FTP program, my hosting provider changes the date upon upload.
If you want to do this automatically, there’s always the .htaccess trick.
Anyway, here are the examples. At least one of these ought to still be working, but as of today, all of them do. (They should all be pretty much safe for work. My standard substitute image is text only, with one cuss word.)
http://www.friendster.com/15332091
http://artinheart.org/
