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Comment by robin_reala | Hacker News Reader

Not that you’d do it, but the temptation there is always to repoint your real application to a different URL and change the original image to something subtly NSFW.

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I was debugging a similar issue where a small marketplace run by a friend was being scrapped and the listings were being used to make a competing marketplace look more active than it actually was.

The thing is, they didn't host the scrapped images themselves, they just hot-linked everything.

So through a little nginx config, we turned their entire homepage to an ad for my friend's platform :)

I assume you mean scraped, not scrapped.

Nope, meant scrapped

In case anyone is inspired to do related things, I made a mistake once (troubling and embarrassing), which I'll mention in case it helps someone else avoid my mistake...

In earlier days of the Web, someone appeared to have hotlinked a photo from a page of mine, as their avatar/signature in some Web forum for another country, and it was eating up way too much bandwidth for my little site.

I handled this in an annoyed and ill-informed way, but which I thought was good-natured, and years later realized it was potentially harmful. I'd changed the URL to serve a new version of the image, to which I'd overlaid text with progressive political slogans relevant to their country. (Thinking I was making a statement to the person about the political issues, and that it would be just a small joke for them, before they changed their avatar/signature to stop hotlinking my bandwidth.) Years later, once I had a bit more understanding of the world, I realized that was very ignorant and cavalier of me, and might've caused serious government or social trouble for the person.

Sensitized by my earlier mistake, I could imagine ways that a subtly NSFW image could cause problems, especially in the workplace, and in some other cultures/countries.

Yeah, you could get someone gulag'd pretty easily if you wanted to and they were in the right location.

Subtle things like flipping the image upside down or reversing the colors or other "not quite harmful but quite annoying" responses are probably better, or just serve a 1x1 pixel image of nothing.

My mind must be in a dark place because once you mentioned politics I thought of how just sitting at home I could easily come up with some kind of image that could literally imprison or kill some one off from thousands of miles away, without even getting up from the couch. I think I spent most of my internet youth lusting for such power.

Some Japanese porn makers avoid getting pirated in China by placing politically sensitive content in the backgrounds

That sounds hilarious! Do you have a link to any articles about this practice?

Found these old articles but I'm not sure if this is a widespread practice

https://news-ltn-com-tw.translate.goog/news/world/breakingne... (nsfw)

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/japan-piracy-09252022...

Thanks! That’s such a clever idea

Widespread in the sense that social media users have done it for long time, and Chinese users are sometimes counteracting by rewriting those into pro-regime phrases, but not what considered safe for commercial entities to exploit. That one is not a professionally produced film.

1: https://news-infoseek-co-jp.translate.goog/article/president... (og: https://news.infoseek.co.jp/article/president_61325/ )

2: https://i.imgur.com/5hjqu3L.jpg (label on bottle and window sign)

Wasn't there news about police officers playing music in order for videos of them triggering automated copyright/DMCA takedowns?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxb94/is-this-beverly-hills...

In reality it would only demonitize it for the uploader and they wouldnt get paid.

There are many songs completely banned from YouTube, like various Jimi Hendrix songs.

Many years ago, back when eBay didn’t even have their own image hosting, I found someone hotlinking to the images from one of my completed auctions for their sale (of an identical product). I ended up swapping the images for ones from urinalpoop.com (seems to no longer exist, but at the time it featured pictures of exactly what you’d imagine by the URL). I ended up getting an angry message from the seller accusing me of “hacking” their auctions.

The angry emails were always the most amusing - the “fbi has seized this domain” image is a fun one to use.

I still have a 5k pixel square blank white gif on my site for times like that (~4kB) that I sub in for anything that gets requested too often, or from particular places.

I was getting hotlinked from controversial sites a lot at one stage, and the common forum software they used didn't force image sizes. So a 5k pixel wide image pushed most of the content off the screen thanks to a centred element :)

I remember from a long time ago something about an image that was corrupted, and did some self referral internally so you could crash applications through out of memory issues even though the image was only a couple of kilobytes. I might have to find it again to serve to hotlinkers!

A startup I used to work for had a horror story from before I started, where a small .png file had been accidentally hotlinked from a third party server. The png showed up on a significant % of users' custom homepages (think myspace, etc). At some point the person operating the server decided that instead of emailing someone or blocking the requests, they'd serve goatse up to a bunch of teenagers and housemoms. Mildly hilarious depending on your perspective, I guess?

This once happened in a particular South Korean news website where it shamelessly stole and hot-linked to a JavaScript file in a third-party website. The domain owner responded it by replacing the file, and the website in question had a warning message and tilted [1] for a while.

[1] https://twitter.com/dohoons/status/880347968800411648

Or something less malicious, like "Donate to Wikipedia", or some other organization.

> Or something less malicious, like "Donate to Wikipedia", or some other organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia:

“Wikipedia has been blocked in China since 23 April 2019”

⇒ putting ads for Wikipedia on sites likely isn’t safe everywhere.

I think it will be very hard to find “some other organization” that is universally ‘approved’ everywhere.

Been there. Done that. Someone had used our image in their phpBB signature. The hits slowed quite quickly.

Wikipedia is anyone can edit. It wouldn't be the first time someone did something like that.

...or a nice steak.

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