MySpace is the scourge of the Internet.

In my recent push to optimize the bandwidth-sucking on my site, I went through my access logs to try to rip out the hotlinkers. Some of the files that were in my top bandwidth users didn’t seem like they should be getting used that often! Most notably… my prom pictures?!?

So I fired up the log viewer; here are some excerpts:

71.48.106.151 - - [05/Mar/2006:18:08:51 -0500] "GET /photos/2005%20Prom%20with%20Kristen/prom.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 61706 "http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=2376569" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)" "-"
68.47.34.249 - - [05/Mar/2006:20:36:14 -0500] "GET /photos/2005%20Prom%20with%20Kristen/dance.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 71466 "http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=20532237" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; (R1 1.5); .NET CLR 1.1.4322)" "-"This continued for pages. Dozens of people on MySpace hotlinking to my prom pictures! I couldn’t really even figure out why… comments ranged from “{naked Barbie picture} + {my prom picture} = happy” to “Look at this prom picture of me! {my prom picture}”.

Obviously, it’s because Kristen is gorgeous and all the little MySpace peons wanted to pretend that they looked like her / dated her. But don’t hotlink her! I did notice that I’m on the first page of Google Image Search for ‘prom’. I guess that’s partially the culprit.

I started off by just blocking the three or four worst-offending sites. MySpace, some photo-sharing site, and a couple foreign sites. The prom picture alone pulled over 300MB of bandwidth by itself, and Cao pulled another couple hundred. Rawr :)

The point of this article, however, is that MySpace is a poster child for an unwholesome trend on the Internet: the empowerment of the MSN Messenger individual. Such a person was previously relegated to sending ‘lolz’ to all their friends and changing their display name every 10 minutes… to finding new ways to destroy the English language and simultaneously ensuring that no message ever fell below the 90% smiley concentration. However, with things like MySpace, FaceBook, and Bebo, those individuals, who previously had no reason to venture past their Flash games websites, are now unleashed onto the Internet proper, wreaking havoc as they go. Hotlinking is only a symptom; they simply have no clue how to conduct themselves on an Internet far bigger than anything they have seen before.

This is the very reason tech support at ZetaBoards is rather intimidating sometimes. People simply have no clue regarding basic principles and concepts of the Internet, if it does not directly apply to them. They don’t understand why glow codes don’t work in “the crappy foxfire browser”. They don’t care about things like bandwidth. They’ve never had to develop a website that works in Internet Explorer. Laziness leads to a lack of understanding.

Perhaps the Internet should be made harder, not easier, to use… let’s go back to Web 1.0 ;)

Dewdles by Sam