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by patio11
4545 days ago
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This sounds like an attempt by Photobucket to avoid people abusing their system in an automated fashion to build scraping sites -- if you get a psuedorandom photo from their collection every time you use an agent other than a common browser, that thwarts people's intentions but doesn't raise any obvious flags until they put a human in the loop. (You can, of course, circumvent this by having your wget say "No, I'm Chrome! Honest!" or using a headless chrome instance, but simple tripwires like this cut down script kiddies by 90%+ in some circumstances.) This happens to interact quirkily with your boss' decision to use PhotoBucket as a CDN for his email and Google's recent implementation of the Gmail image caching feature. |
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We've had Gmail image caching turned on for a while and these images just started showing up like this today... it seems like Photobucket/tinypic just swapped the images out from under us a couple hours ago. Brian has been sending emails with these images for at least a year.
Also, I feel slightly responsible for not enforcing good practices... never occurred to me to investigate how he was putting those images in his emails.
In other amusing news, I want to check this out without Google image caching... but first need to sign up for a non-google hosted email address since I forgot the password to my Yahoo mail account from all those years back.
Update:: I used a disposable email box that doesn't do Gmail image caching, we're getting the same results:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/arzmt2kcpqovrnd/Screenshot%202014-...