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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

At the height of the browser wars I once woke up to Microsoft hotlinking a small button for downloading our software from the MSN homepage. I tried to reach someone there for hours but nobody cared enough to do something about it. The image was small (no more than a few K), but the millions of requests that page got were enough to totally kill our server.

Finally, I replaced the image on there with a 'Netscape Now' button. Within 15 minutes the matter was resolved.

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Back around 2002, I had a pdf icon on my website. It got deep linked by a few others but the number one source of traffic came from the website of a lawyer who specialised in intellectual property. There was something on there about how it was illegal to deep link.

I was tempted to replace with goatse but I think I just changed it to a screenshot of his website saying that it was illegal to deep link.

It soon got changed.

That's a neat example of recursion :)

I honestly don't understand the issue- he linked to a specific page? What's the problem?

I believe they mean the lawyer hotlinked [1] their image so that every visitor to the lawyer’s page would result in an image download from their server.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking

He deeplinked to an image file, whilst claiming on his website that such action is illegal.

Is deeplinking the same as hotlinking?

Even though it's not illegal!

One of my friends used the same strategy to block DDOS from China : just put "Falun Gong" on there and it was resolved instantly.

I remember someone doing that with the goatse picture. The hotlinker was pissed and all sorts of amusing drama ensued.

That was exactly how I learned what goatse was. My MySpace page was all decked out with images that I was hotlinking from some server... The server owner realized this and replaced all the images with Goatse. One day a friend goes "Hey... uh, what's up with your MySpace page... that's pretty gross". So I went to log in: Goastse. Goastse everywhere (gestures with hand). And my eyes were never the same again ಠ_ಠ

Edit: grammar.

That was popular in the early ebay days when you had to host your own images. A friend had someone selling similar items using his image links. So he changed the images to goatse. Problem solved.

The Tribalwar forums did this to CNN after 9/11, CNN had hotlinked one of those images where people were trying to pick out "demon faces" in the smoke

It wasn't only CNN. A bunch of big news sites linked directly to the image hosted at tribalwar. It all started with some news video of one of the WTC towers smoking. Someone on the forum screenshoted the video and asked "what is this?" because the smoke produced this weird devil-like formation. That picture goes spread around and soon news sites started writing stories saying that triablwar had photoshopped the image and that they were evil and making fun of a tragedy blah blah blah. So basically the news sites were DDOSing tribalwar and lying about them to make them look bad in their sensationalist articles. The administrators of the forums send many emails begging them to stop directly linking to the site and it only got worse and worse. Finally they replaced the image with goatse (with text overplayed giving the true story). If I remember correctly the image was viewed by hundreds of thousands or maybe more people before they were totally removed. That was how tribalwar goatsed the internet. It really was quite legendary.

According to the article IPs downloading this image come mostly from India.

So replace it with the pakistani flag to solve the problem (or start WW3)

> One of my friends used the same strategy to block DDOS from China : just put "Falun Gong" on there and it was resolved instantly.

...because attacks from China are horrified at the thought of disrupting Falun Gong?

Because it is one of the things that will get you added to the blocklists that form part of the Great Firewall of China.

It won't stop a hacker who is probably bypassing parts of that anyway, but the more casual requests such as those caused by deep linking will generally stop getting through.

We used something like this technique back in the Flash days. Sites would straight up steal your games, so one defense was to have the game grab its sprites from a server local endpoint. Thieving sites would get either no graphics or deliberately corrupted graphics.

The old school response, weaponized without being inappropriate.

That's hilarious!

Did they continue to link to your software after that? (I'm curious - what was your software?)

Yes, they did, they actually thought it was quite funny. They even cached the actual download once they realized we wouldn't be able to deal with that either. The software was the first version of the public peer-to-peer webcam software I wrote:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000510010712/http://www.camarad...

Oh my! This is a blast from the past. I was a kid, probably 10 years old or something, and I had a LEGO MovieMaker webcam. I was trying to set it up as a sort of security/monitoring camera for the back door of the small business my parents ran. I remember using this software and supposedly getting it working.

I invited my parents to come see what I had done, and somehow typed the website wrong and ended up on a spanish-language porn site. I could not hit the back button fast enough. Possibly one of the most embarrassing memories of my childhood.

I have no idea what my parents thought I was up to.

Heh. Hilarious story, thank you! Camarades.com had just about everything, from people being born to people dying and everything in between. It was a pretty honest (sometimes brutally honest) slice of life.

One of the most popular cams for years was an old person that was extremely ill and that rarely moved but he had pretty big fanclub and he thought it was quite funny that he was more famous on what eventually became his deathbed than he had ever been while he was still active. After he died his family asked to remove all the images and close the account which of course we did. Makes you wonder if all those people wishing him well over the years kept him going a bit longer. What is interesting is that if you did this today I'm pretty sure the jerks would drown out the nice people by a considerable margin, of course there were jerks back then as well, but on the whole the internet seemed to be a much nicer place to hang out than it is today.

Not sure if you're aware, but it's interesting that you mention Lego as the person you're responding to once accidentally bought literally tons of bulk Lego and later designed an automated Lego sorting machine. It's a fun read:

https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/

Haha I know that pain.

When I was a kid I asked my mom to print me out Grand Theft Auto cheats from Gamewinners.com while she was in work.

Somehow I got the address wrong and she wanted to know why I wanted to print out pages and pages from a site dedicated to men cheating on their wives. Got there in the end though and I still have some of those GTA cheats memorised.

Your mom might have another family in the Greater Toronto Area now, just so you are aware!

My then-wife was watching over my shoulder once as I typed something into the address bar. “Freshmeat.net” auto-completed, drawing a suspicious look from her.

Beautiful. The internet was a truly different place back then...

With 100K visitors / day or so we were in the top 30 websites world wide in 1998. The really big boosts came from the Space Shuttle webcasts and an Yves St. Laurent fashion show webcast from Paris.

Hard to believe now, a typical blog post will already pick up 30K visitors without too much trouble.

I could listen to stories of the Old Net all day.

Enjoy:

https://jacquesmattheij.com/story-behind-wwcom-camaradescom/

And apologies for the non-working images.

Sweet, looking forward to reading.

Serves you right for hotlinking ;-)

Yes, but at least it was my own domain :)

I didn't see that consequence coming when camarades.com shut down. I really should dig up those images and repair the blog but the todo list isn't really getting any shorter on this end.

How is this on the Wayback machine?!

You can click "about this capture" for more information

> Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.

Fun fact: Amazon's home assistant was named after Alexa Internet. Amazon owns Alexa Internet.

it's not named after it, it's just amazon is so massive they have to reuse brand names. AWS has exhausted not only the supply of IPv4 addresses but also the supply of 3 letter initialisms.

What's an embargo period?

A period during which someone who knows something or has something does not release it to the public.

As pioneer of "<something> On Internet", do you regret not turning out like Russ Hanneman? ;) (OR DID YOU???!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo&ab_channel=yate5...

https://silicon-valley.fandom.com/wiki/Russ_Hanneman

I'm just glad I didn't turn out like Erlich Bachman! (OR DID I???!)

https://www.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/4jmlv9/wh...

https://silicon-valley.fandom.com/wiki/Erlich_Bachman

I've finally gotten around to watching this series, and it's disturbing how many moments I've watched that were more familiar than they should have been, and too many characters I could instantly put a real name to....

Around...2005? 2006? I discovered someone had deep-linked to an image on work's webserver, where I was admin (being one of the few who knew Linux).

Instead of just outright replacing the image, I set up rules in Apache to check the referer, and if it was our site, serve the correct image. Anyone else, it served up something...questionable.

Problem solved.

In the early 2000s a friend of mine was an active seller on ebay. He shot his own product pictures and professionally designed the description pages. Soon enough his content was stolen by competing shops, hotlinking the images from his server.

Ebay didn't care. So obviously the only option was to create a script that would randomly change the images to something unpleasant (think early 2000s rotten internet content).

Good times.

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