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Blog: Stop Stolen Content with Apache Mod_Rewrite!

I was checking my wordpress admin panel, and noticed a new incoming link today. Oh cool, I thought. Someone nice has linked to me. I opened up the link to check it out and there was my article on how to set up a cisco router as a webserver. The whole thing. Images. Dynamips/Dynagen .net files. Everything! Everything copied word for word with someone else claiming they had written it down the bottom! And he/she had the gall to hotlink to my images! Grrrrr

I guess once your blog becomes popular enough that people start stealing your content, its kind of a milestone, but it kind of pissed me off. I read Lorelle’s fantastic post on what to do when someone steals your content, and shot of a few email’s which were ignored. I had to do something to protect my content. Hotlinking like this is just plain rude!

I fired up notepad and with a bit of research on apache’s mod_rewrite I have implemented this:

.htaccess:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://ardenpackeer.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.ardenpackeer.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.feedburner.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://feeds.feedburner.com/ardenpackeer.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png|txt|net)$ /nolink.jpg [NC,L]


I copied this .htaccess file to my uploads directory under wordpress. Now when someone hotlinks they get something like this:

Stolen Article:

The Rewrite Condition is basically saying if a link is not from ardenpackeer.com, google, feedburner, then redirect all images to http://ardenpackeer.com/nolink.jpg. Its probably not perfect, but it did the job!

I could of been evil and did something like:

RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png|txt|net)$ http://goatse.cz/ [NC,R]

Using the [NC,R] you can redirect them to whatever site (or picture) you want >-).

I’m going to have to put a watermark image on my pictures now! I hope this helps someone else who is facing a similar problem.

© 2008 Arden Packeer. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway. This material is not sponsored or endorsed by Cisco Systems, Inc. Cisco, Cisco Systems, CCIE and the CCIE Logo are trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and its affiliates