:: gia’s blog ::

I started following this yesterday, assuming that it would be very short-lived albeit hilarious… But it’s still happening, so figure I should let you know about it.

A while ago a guy decided to test the macro function on his new camera by taking an extreme close-up of a pound coin.

(click for larger)

Fine.

When Conservative-MP-With-A-Blog Andrew Robathan wrote a post about the Party subscription rate, he decided to use this guy’s extreme close-up image of a pound coin on his blog. Well, instead of doing the right thing by copying the image and hosting it on his own (or Blogger’s) server, he hotlinked directly to the image on the guy’s server. We all know that is ‘stealing bandwidth‘.

Now, as those of you who have ever had anyone embed one of your images on their blog or a messageboard know, one of the best ways of stopping people from stealing your bandwidth is to alter the image they are displaying in some way. When my old blog was hijacked by a spammer I replaced every image on the front page with images pointing out that the blog had been hijacked. When Anina embedded an image of mine on her blog, I changed it to an image that said something like, ‘Anina is stealing bandwidth’ (she then thought I had actually hacked her blog…). Or what about the time when some rightwing Americans embedded one of my photos on their messageboard. I first replaced it with an image of Dr. Laura naked, then replaced it with a nasty little fucker given to me by ‘a friend’ which basically crashed anyone’s computer who opened that thread.

Well, the guy who is hosting the image of the pound coin decided to be considerably more subtle than that.

Here is the altered version:

He did this yesterday and it still hasn’t been noticed by the MP:

And, unfortunately for the MP, he accepts anonymous, unmoderated comments.

Where it all started… of course.