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Comment by jason_slack | Hacker News Reader

I had this happen to a client. The Chinese company was literally hot-linking to everything. I used a site sucker to grab the site they had put up to tell this.

So we changed the domain name, moved the site.

We then replaced the assets under the domain name they were using with assets that might offend folks when looked at.

Not everyone can change the domain though.

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You'd be amazed what an Nginx configuration serving a conditional message in favor of freedom of expression and self-determination for Taiwan can accomplish. Not much for international politics, but it will resolving the hotlinking problem very, very quickly.

I'm surprised this didn't come up with the github script tag DDOS. I know they changed content to try to encourage them to stop, but it was an inconvenience to users, like alert() calls, so of course it was no where near as effective as this.

> I'm surprised this didn't come up with the github script tag DDOS.

The main Chinese-Github DDOS was the Chinese Goverment/Great Firewall of China was it intercepting Chinese websites for non-chinese IPs, and inserting a script that DDOSed Github. Chinese users weren't relevant here.

That's a good point. I just want to be clear that we are not looking for ways to weaponize their or even our own website :)

Just trying to get some input on a tricky situation. Should we expand to China earlier than planned? Should we ignore it? etc pp

You could have set your server to only send offensive images when the referer for the assets is their website. Then you should be able to continue using your website as normal.

At the time we were using a GoDaddy shared solution and didn't have access to change a lot of the config.

then someone hotlinking to your site were the least of your worries then ;)

You can use clodeflare to protect your CDN, being used by third party.

Good idea. At the time I had no idea CloudFlare existed.

We're behind cloudflare and hosted on AWS. They're not hotlinking anything, but they copied the whole site 1:1. Please see my "real" submission with links to the sites: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11455670

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