Stealing content or another person's bandwidth is despicable.
Earlier tonight while reviewing the logs of Irish ISP Test I discovered that a "charming" individual (or company) had decided that it would be a really "good" idea to abuse the test by hotlinking to it via an iframe.
We've always offered the test for free, so why the hell would someone abuse it in this manner?
Will we have to oblige users to jump through hoops to check their download speeds? Or should we simply block all non-Irish users? (yes - I am very aware of how awkward and messy that would be)
Hotlinking Scum
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About this Entry
This page contains a single entry by Michele Neylon published on February 4, 2006 5:08 AM.
One Year Older! was the previous entry in this blog.
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Why not replace the file being hotlinked with some pornography, that way it would appear on their site and upset their visitors.
Nasty, and doesn't make sense. Cool tester, I hadn't been able to use it before because I didn't have Java installed :)
Donncha
they were obviously trying to offer the service without paying for either the software or the bandwidth, as they had iframed in just the applet section
Lovely. I assume you took action? Last time this happened to me I just had it serve the offending site (ironically, a libertarian site; they're meant to be worried about personal property...) a nasty little note instead.
Rob - it's amazing what you can do with a couple of lines of javascript :)
Or you could take it as a compliment! I happen to live in a rural area where our only "choice" of community broadband is ildana.net Their level of service is stunningly bad with an incredible apathy to customers. With average upload speeds of 45k and download speeds of 150k, people were not getting what they paid for -even when it worked- when I pointed several subscribers to your ISP test guess what happened? some days later ildana announced that speeds were being increased! So well done!
Chris - compliment? No. Sorry. They iframed in only one part of the speed test, so none of our branding was visible. This basically meant they could abuse the service without paying for the bandwidth while letting their visitors think the service was provided by them
Michele
Theft would be a more appropriate word, really.