Hotlinking the Vegetable

The Middle-Fork post: Light In The Forest 5

This is my most popular hotlinked photograph, and today it started be pulled in from:

1) http://forgetfullypink.proboards55.com/index.cgi?
2) board=hr&action=display&thread=1134872125&page=1

I went there and scanned for the image, but oddly, no image. I removed the filter that blocks my IP from my view of the access log, and reloaded. Hmm, nothing. So I started reading.

Ah ha! There is a link to the image, and the visible text is the URL itself. Very cool. No attributions, but by now you know that's okay with me. Seeing the URL is attribution in itself.

But I can't locate any search string, whoever did this knew to pluck the URL from image properties. But the where was the original?


The first IP gives

therobotvegetable@hosting ~ $ host -a 70.187.192.240
Trying "240.192.187.70.in-addr.arpa"
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 49969
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;240.192.187.70.in-addr.arpa. IN PTR

;; ANSWER SECTION:
240.192.187.70.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN PTR ip70-187-192-240.dc.dc.cox.net.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
192.187.70.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN NS ns.cox.net.
192.187.70.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN NS ns.east.cox.net.
192.187.70.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN NS ns.west.cox.net.

Received 150 bytes from 65.197.143.152#53 in 67 ms

Cox.net has a useless front page, but their animation is trying to sell me cable tv and webmail. So again, not much information about the subscriber. That's cool, I don't need to know.

I registered and said Hi and thanks! And promptly ran into one of the things that make this whole effort one in which diplomacy is important. Although I say thanks, and said nothing negative, the response seemed to be preloaded with suspicion. I blame the music companies who want to make their customers into criminals, and all those idiots out there who want to destroy fair use.

And now, reading more carefully, someone else in thread said

did you know that its against the law to use a pic with a copyright on it?

This is naive. You don't need to put the copyright notice on something for it to be copyrighted - you get that automatically. After that, I'm not sure how long it takes after abandoning something to the commons for the copyright to become so dilute that it doesn't exist. That's a (minor) part of what I'm up to, but really, I generate tons of good stuff. If I lose something by not saying That's Mine! that's okay by me.

So, a big Shout Out to the anonymous person who posted the link! I asked how they found the image, and posted the link to the Light in the Forest archive for their further viewing pleasure.


UPDATE: It doesn't make sense that they plucked the URL from image properties. If they did that, the image now lives somewhere else, and I wouldn't be seeing anything my my access log. It's the dark matter in this universe.

So, they have a connection which rotates among a range of IPs, or they use several connections. Persuing this theory, I find a Google Images search string at 18:16 from 68.224.29.162. The first hotlink occurs at 19:45. That's time to go eat, or something. Here's the referring search URL:

1) http://images.google.com/imgres?
2) imgurl=http://www.middle-fork.org/archives/lif5.gif&
3) imgrefurl=http://www.middle-fork.org/archives/2005/01/&
4) h=376&w=600&sz=189&tbnid=WeGGU2TqOQOBWM:&tbnh=83&tbnw=133&
5) hl=en&start=10&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dlight%2Bin%2Bforest%
6) 26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26safe%3Doff%26client%
7) 3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DG

The search strings are on line 5 again: light in forest
This is the search results page. It's on the first page, cool. Houdini's Big Yawn is buried so deeply I gave up looking.
Here's what you see after clicking on the thumbnail.

And the IP? It's another cox.net number.

therobotvegetable@hosting $ host -a 68.224.29.162
Trying "162.29.224.68.in-addr.arpa"
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 48598
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;162.29.224.68.in-addr.arpa. IN PTR

;; ANSWER SECTION:
162.29.224.68.in-addr.arpa. 70155 IN PTR ip68-224-29-162.lv.lv.cox.net.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
29.224.68.in-addr.arpa. 70155 IN NS ns.cox.net.
29.224.68.in-addr.arpa. 70155 IN NS ns.east.cox.net.
29.224.68.in-addr.arpa. 70155 IN NS ns.west.cox.net.

Received 148 bytes from 65.197.143.152#53 in 0 ms


Bingo!

UPDATE 18Dec2005: This is the response from the hotlinker in regards to my speculation about why two IPs:

i have no idea what your talking about. i found ALL of my BG images on google.