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First of all, I both agree and disagree with you. :D The OP's idea was sound - and not without precedence - but the execution was flawed. I say not without precedence, because people have been spitting in the eye of internet theft since the first person figured out how to configure their web server to behave differently based on the Referer header. Many, many "hot-linkers" (including some fairly well known U.S. politicians...) have gotten an image that was unflattering, simply because they or their staff couldn't be bothered to download and host it themselves. (: However, I do agree with you in that one cannot be certain about information lifted from WHOIS and Google. That brand of revenge is quite thoughtless, and could have severe repercussions on someone (and, as you pointed out, their family) who's completely innocent. As such, while it may sound childish, replacing assets for scrapers to such an extent that they get something embarrassing is, IMHO, perfectly fine, so long as it's kept childish (e.g., they receive pages that state "I spent all that time on my scraper and all I got was this lousy GeoCities page", complete with ugly animated gifs), and not malicious, like posting someone's personal information. |