It’s not like I’m paying for the bandwidth that thelocust[dot]org currently utilizes, but now that web-space is plentiful and most people have a general understanding of how the intarweb works, there is no reason to link to an image like such

>img src=”https://thelocust.org/images/whatever.jpg”<

Just right-click, download the image and post it on your own site! Otherwise, the people who host that image (played in this production by me) could change that image to whatever they want, and thusly your website (played by reres.com in this production) may end up looking like this, or perhaps this, or even this.

Comedy ensues when the images you are linking to are used in a certain javascript snow toy. Clicky on the puking frat-boy to be admonished! Ha!

Well, after I posted that trogdor image I captured, it seemed that a number of gaming-related messageboard denizens had picked it up. Ooh, it’s fun for about five minutes to fool with these clownshoes, so then I decided to employ Apache‘s mod_rewrite to replace any outside-linked images with this image. All you have to do is place a file called .htaccess in the directory with the images. Inside the .htacces file put:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://thelocust.org/.*$     [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.thelocust.org/.*$  [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://stats.thelocust.org/.*$  [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(png|PNG|gif|GIF|jpg|JPG)$ https://thelocust.org/404s/heyjackhole.jpg [R]

Simple, eh? An example of this in use: clicky example