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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."
Is anyone else just getting the google homepage when they go to www.fuddruckers.com ?
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
We all know what hyperlinking is. Hotlinking is different.
Hotlinking is the practice of taking someone else's resources, typically images, sounds, flash files, etc, and displaying them inline in your own HTML page. This causes losses to the creator because they still have to pay for the bandwidth of serving the file, but reap no benefits. For example, the creator may have advertising around the page with the Flash game that never gets seen.
Hotlinking is generally seen as very bad form among web developers.
The Fuddrucker's site doesn't give the URL and email, that's only showing up in the game itself. Fudd's doesn't credit the author in any way on their own site.
Furthermore, as several have already noted, this type of link also constitutes bandwith theft.
Wouldn't a small-time flash developer want this sort of exposure?
No. I can say that with utmost confidence, being one myself.
Doing some sort of goatse move to poor kids who are expecting to play a game is just wrong. This guy should be taken to court or something for indecent exposure.
RTFA. He didn't put up anything obscene, he put up images from a slaughterhouse. And even if he had put up something obscene, the idea of taking him to court would be ridiculous. He's free to put whatever content he likes on his own site (provided the content itself is legal), and he's not obligated to preserve anything that someone else links to.
Absolutely fascinating! I hope they did not point everything dere. host www.fuddruckers.com www.fuddruckers.com has address 66.102.7.99 whois -h whois.arin.net 66.102.7.99 OrgName: Google Inc. OrgID: GOGL Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway City: Mountain View StateProv: CA PostalCode: 94043 Country: US