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Fuddruckers Called Out on Hotlinking
naught writes "Fuddruckers, a hamburger chain, hotlinked to a flash game developer's Burgertime clone on their 'Fuddrockers' page. When the developer noticed an abnormal amount of traffic coming from their website, he decided to let the company know how he felt -- and maybe teach them about hotlinking.." From the post: "So, I redirected everything coming from Fuddruckers.com. (learned all about .htaccess files also... neat!) Wrote a nice little message pointing out how incredibly stupid their web developer is. And then redirected the main page to a pleasant little website showing photographs of slaughterhouses. And also opened up some more popups, for those that don't have popup blockers."
on the fuddruckers webpage isn't a very good advert for their product... really... the kid is already obese...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
From: Justin Daniels
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 19:056:32 -0400
To: webmaster
Subject: Complaint about your website
To Whom It May Concern;
Upon returning from a birthday party at one of your restaurants in Atlanta, my ten year old son wanted to look at the Fuddrucker's website. Normally, I am very restrictive on what Joshua may view, but I was confident that the content on your website would be child appropriate.
Much to my dismay, my son became very upset at something he saw on your site. When I went to investigate, I discovered numerous pop-up browser windows detailing how cows are killed and slaughtered, and ground into hamburger meat! This information was thrust upon him when he clicked on a link to a game called "BurgerTime" from your so-called "Fuddrockers" page, which appears to be intended for children.
My child is still upset, and it has taken my wife almost an hour to calm him down. Now he has said he will never eat a hamburger again, and has been repeatedly apologizing for helping "kill the cows".
I am absolutely appalled that you post this sort of information on your website. It is my duty, as a parent, to teach my children where meat comes from.
I can safely say that my family and I will never step foot in another Fuddrucker's restaurant after this traumatic evening.
Justin Daniels
Atlanta, Georgia
Yep, they did it again. Now they're linking to google!
da w00t. mtfnpy?
This reminds me of one day, when I was reading my access_logs and discovered that some bastard was hotlinking to a "Powered by SuSE" png button on my server. He had placed the image in his .sig on some forum and didn't bother to host the pic in his own web-space. I wanted to teach him a lesson, and thus the "Powered by Goatse" image was born. After setting Apache to serve the new picture instead, requests dropped dramatically during the next week :)
Recently I upgraded my personal photo gallery to a new version of software, eliminating the need for a publicly accessible directory full of images. Well, since my site has been around for a few years, I've collected a goodly number of people at sites like LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace, and various other sites who have taken to linking some of my full res photos (2MB-5MB each) as the background for their sites.
Most of these sites are especially crappy, and as such, the bandwidth used wasn't much, so for the time being I didn't do anything about it.
Well, with the removal of the albums directory, I decided to redirect all requests for images in it to this annoyingly animated strobing GIF. This has the wonderful affect of making many, many crappy sites blink horribly. Like this and this.