They Are Hotlinking Your Icon
This is a copy and paste from my weblog:
Time to edit that robots.txt file. Pouring over one of the many site stat tools I get from my host, I found this nasty site that crawls the web looking for your site icon and then proceeds to hotlink it, sucking up your bandwidth. Take a gander at the bastards who are hotlinking icons all over the web.
However, from me they barking up the wrong tree...I never name my icons 'favicon'. I always use a unique name that relates to the site.
Roo
bja888 (not verified) posted this at 10:26 — 16th March 2005.
They have: 5,633 posts
Joined: Jan 1970
Personaly I think its kinda cool seeing everyones icons. and you can also see the page they where stolen from!
Roo posted this at 10:33 — 16th March 2005.
She has: 840 posts
Joined: Apr 1999
Yeah, but what about people paying for hosting without a whole lot of bandwidth alloted each month? They can end up getting hit with additional fees.
Roo
Greg K posted this at 16:34 — 16th March 2005.
He has: 2,145 posts
Joined: Nov 2003
Well you also have places like Google that index your images as well. That is where a protection script/htaccess rewrite comes in handy.
Additionally, I went to the site, and did notice that at least they provide info on how to block it from being viewed and suggest contacting them if you ned immediate removal. Plus they claim that it can help you see if someone else is using yours. (see http://iconsurf.com/copyrights.html)
Roo: how do you get the browser to display something other than favicon.ico in the address bar? I thought it was only that filename.
-Greg
Roo posted this at 20:03 — 16th March 2005.
She has: 840 posts
Joined: Apr 1999
Yes, but Google doesn't hotlink.
You don't have to use favicon.ico
For example I use:
on my blog
Greg K posted this at 20:38 — 16th March 2005.
He has: 2,145 posts
Joined: Nov 2003
cool! learn something new everyday!
Thanks.
-Greg
MidHost Staff posted this at 16:45 — 22nd March 2005.
He has: 11 posts
Joined: Mar 2005
use some hotlink protection to block them
andy206uk posted this at 17:14 — 22nd March 2005.
He has: 1,758 posts
Joined: Jul 2002
I favicon is usually less than 1k in size... they would have to serve up your image a hell of a lot to eat any major amount of bandwidth...
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