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"Defacing" Sites Without Intruding?
clambert asks: "In putting the finishing touches on a recently launched site, I decided to place one of the many 'Powered By PHP' logos on the bottom of the page. Being tired, I carelessly put in a direct link to the file on the server offering the image. The next evening, I was informed that there was a large, offensive picture on the bottom of every page. Apparently, the webmaster of the remote server thought it would be funny to replace the 900 byte PHP logo with a 121KB 'photo' (I'll spare everyone from the details). This was done without contacting any of our admins first, and was clearly a move to deface our site's presentation. Would bandwidth have been their concern, they wouldn't of increased the size of the image being requested. Although we're not considering it, my question is who would have the upper hand if this were a high profile case brought to court. Intentionally defacing a site's appearance, but without breaking into the any of the site's servers." Publishing content on the web largely boils down to a matter of trust. If you are going to link from your homepage to an image, or another web page, you are trusting the author of the web page (and the administrator of that web server, assuming they aren't one and the same) to keep that content intact. So what should happen when that trust is broken, if anything?
Come on; didn't you read the post? He was tired. I can sympathize with him. Once, I went to the store to buy several DVD players. It had been a long day, though, so I accidentally went to the loading dock instead of inside the store, and accidentally walked away with the DVD players without paying for them.
That you were too lazy to copy an 800 byte image to your own server and link to that? Yes, I recognize that such tasks are a huge chore. Hell, it would probably take an hour just to download the image, and another hour reading through documentation and sending emails to support lists to figure out how to move the image to a directory you can link to, and then probably at least half an hour (again, slogging through that documentation) to figure out how to change the image link in your html document. And then there's the cost issue. Hard drives aren't cheap, and 800 bytes is almost two full sectors! Plus you have the inconvenience of having 800 bytes of storage space on your system no longer available for other uses. All around it is just a day long pain in the ass ordeal. But, once you are finally finished the good news is that your site won't be able to be defaced like that anymore.