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."

Obviously he wasn't a Slashdotter...

[Alioth]

Obviously this guy wasn't a Slashdotter, or he'd have linked to our favorite image... the Goatse Guy!

Neopets and Livejournal users are just as bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, glad I'm not the only person to use this technique against bandwidth thieves. Stupid neopets and livejournal users.

I redirected all the traffic from their site back to their own site. Neopets thought we were ripping off their site, when in fact I repointed the DNS of the site they were abusing back at them.

Modder Fuddruckers

[dotslashdot]

Those modder fuddruckers! Every modder fuddurcking time I see that modder fuddrucking restaurant, I start cussing like a modder fuddrucker.

the fat kid

[advocate_one]

on the fuddruckers webpage isn't a very good advert for their product... really... the kid is already obese...

They'll be sorry now!

[Anonymous Coward]

From: Justin Daniels
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 19:056:32 -0400
To: webmaster
Subject: Complaint about your website

To Whom It May Concern;

Upon returning from a birthday party at one of your restaurants in Atlanta, my ten year old son wanted to look at the Fuddrucker's website. Normally, I am very restrictive on what Joshua may view, but I was confident that the content on your website would be child appropriate.

Much to my dismay, my son became very upset at something he saw on your site. When I went to investigate, I discovered numerous pop-up browser windows detailing how cows are killed and slaughtered, and ground into hamburger meat! This information was thrust upon him when he clicked on a link to a game called "BurgerTime" from your so-called "Fuddrockers" page, which appears to be intended for children.

My child is still upset, and it has taken my wife almost an hour to calm him down. Now he has said he will never eat a hamburger again, and has been repeatedly apologizing for helping "kill the cows".

I am absolutely appalled that you post this sort of information on your website. It is my duty, as a parent, to teach my children where meat comes from.

I can safely say that my family and I will never step foot in another Fuddrucker's restaurant after this traumatic evening.

Justin Daniels
Atlanta, Georgia

Re: Sounds like slashdot, no?

[vettemph]

a major company such as [who ever], with countless hits per day, linking like this to a site, without even notifying the site to verify if they have the bandwidth available,

The fuddrucker effect?

But in all seriousness people!`

[bobbyw]

Now how the fuck am I going to play burgertime?

Slashdot Logic

[oskard]

Let me get this straight. Homeboy complains about his bandwidth getting jacked, thus DoSing his web server. So we slashdot him? BRILLIANT.

Google

[NitsujTPU]

Well, apparently they didn't know how to fix it either, since, now, all requests are going straight to Google.

Re:www.fuddrruckers.com

[Da w00t]

Yep, they did it again. Now they're linking to google!

Re:Obviously he wasn't a Slashdotter...

[usv]

This reminds me of one day, when I was reading my access_logs and discovered that some bastard was hotlinking to a "Powered by SuSE" png button on my server. He had placed the image in his .sig on some forum and didn't bother to host the pic in his own web-space. I wanted to teach him a lesson, and thus the "Powered by Goatse" [users.tkk.fi] image was born. After setting Apache to serve the new picture instead, requests dropped dramatically during the next week :)

Fun with old hotlinked images...

[nuxx]

Recently I upgraded my personal photo gallery to a new version of software, eliminating the need for a publicly accessible directory full of images. Well, since my site has been around for a few years, I've collected a goodly number of people at sites like LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace, and various other sites who have taken to linking some of my full res photos (2MB-5MB each) as the background for their sites.

Most of these sites are especially crappy, and as such, the bandwidth used wasn't much, so for the time being I didn't do anything about it.

Well, with the removal of the albums directory, I decided to redirect all requests for images in it to this annoyingly animated strobing GIF [nuxx.net]. This has the wonderful affect of making many, many crappy sites blink horribly. Like this [myspace.com] and this [xanga.com].

Re:Google

[Infinityis]

Nah, that's not sensational enough for Slashdot. What must be happening is that Google bought out Fuddruckers as a means to finally start selling some Google Gulp. Nobody saw this one coming...

However, it might backfire and reduce the usefulness of Google. I noticed that if I go to Google and type in "fuddruckers" and then click "I'm feeling Lucky", I'm right back at Google again. If Google bought out EVERY web page (like how they apparently bought Fuddruckers), their relevance might reduce to nothing, which explains why they really wanted to sell off all those shares of stock.

The evil bit has been FLIPPED!

ok

[brandanglendenning]

that isn't childish.

Re:Fun with old hotlinked images...

[i41Overlord]

Well, with the removal of the albums directory, I decided to redirect all requests for images in it to this annoyingly animated strobing GIF. This has the wonderful affect of making many, many crappy sites blink horribly. Like this and this.

I believe proper 1337 }{aX0r etiquette is to change hotlinked images to goatse.

Re:Two wrongs..

[deep44]

After further review, I've determined that three "wrongs" actually bring justice to this situation (very complex equations involved; not enough time to figure out how to print all those funny mathematical symbols in HTML). Anyway, here's my solution:

# while true ; do
> wget http://games.briggster.com/media/burgertime.swf [briggster.com]
> rm burgertime.swf
> done

*yawn* Goodnight.

He was too kind

[t_allardyce]

I would have linked it to goatse.cx - its the only way to really make a lasting impact.

Re:Hotlink THIS

[TheScorpion420]

This is kinda funny. I wonder how many blogs or whatever complain about slashdot. I wonder which one has a bigger impact, the traffic from fuddruckers.com or a slashdotting, hmm mabye by the time of the dupe he will have graphs on his blog and be complaining how much slashdot killed his bandwidth?

Re:Ass

[halcyon1234]

Plagiarism for profit purposes is greedy, shows undue pride, obviously Fuddrucker's web designer was envious of the Flash programmer's skill, but too slothful to acquire or implement them. Four deadly sins right there.

And the worst part was, after Fuddrucker's did all that, they went out and lustfully masturbated to pictures of his flash game, then got angry that his game was so much better than anything they could come up with, so they went off and gluttonously bathed themselves in Fuddrucker's Special Sauce to make themselves feel pretty.

So, like, wow. These guys are evil. And not just evil... but bold tagged, capital lettered, exclaimation marked, one-for-an-i'd, Kevin Spacied EV1L!

Re:Hotlinking != Hyperlinking

[jo42]

When someone did that with my images, increasing my usage at least 10-fold, I replaced them all with goatse...

Re:Ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Plagiarism for profit purposes is greedy, shows undue pride, obviously Fuddrucker's web designer was envious of the Flash programmer's skill, but too slothful to acquire or implement them. Four deadly sins right there.

And in response, Mr. Briggs' own pride resulted in their actions incuring his wrath, as it was far easier to be an asshat than to deal with things in a civil maner (that's sloth). Admittedly he's only got three there, but personally I think the list should be expanded to include asshattery.

Re:What the fuck?

[jpn]

Oh and by the way, the word 'cunt' is the most widely used expletive in my language (only it's an adjective around here) it's bandied about by everybody both in real life and on television day and night, even in polite conversation. It lost it's power to shock twenty years ago.

Reminds me of the time that the Pope and one of his cardinals were traveling by train. The Pope who was doing a crossword puzzle, looked up and asked his cardinal "What's a four letter word ending in '-unt' that means 'woman'?" The cardinal blushed, became rather flustered, and after a few moments of indecision blurted out "Aunt! It's 'aunt'!" The Pope said "Of course! I should have known. Can I borrow your eraser?"

Slashdot calling the kettle black?

[d34thm0nk3y]

Am I the only one who sees the incredible hypocrasy of slashdotters complaining about a high traffic site hotlinking to other sites and drastically increasing bandwidth use?