ASCII by Jason Scott / Freedom, Justice and a Disturbingly Gaping Ass

Freedom, Justice and a Disturbingly Gaping Ass

I’ll be nice and warn you that this essay links to disturbing images. That is, THIS ENTRY LINKS TO VERY DISTURBING IMAGES SO IF YOU LIKE EVERYTHING TO BE A VARIATION OF KITTENS LICKING EACH OTHERS EARS YOU ARE GOING TO THE WRONG PLACE. PLEASE GLIDE ALONG QUIETLY TO THE NEXT OR PREVIOUS WEBLOG ENTRIES WHERE YOU WILL BE A MUCH HAPPIER PERSON.

Everyone gone? OK, good.

I mentioned in a previous entry about the happy-go-lucky adventure of the massive downloading of a single image on textfiles.com, one of a cheery Grim Reaper holding a glowing hourglass. It was quite popular, and I talked about the situation where I had seen downloading of this image go from nothing before April 2006 and it had quickly unseated all other comers by a factor of 100 to become the most downloaded file out of the millions in the textfiles.com family of websites. This was, I mused, some sort of payback for when I was a youth and a leech, and so I let it go. Incredulity was the order of the day in the comments, with a few people speculating that since my website doesn’t know where the source of my files always are, I might in fact be considered compelled to do this sort of charity work to atone. Others thought that I was brave to allow hotlinking at all.

Both, it turned out, were wrong. Idly sitting around during the holiday season, I went to go check how that popular ol’ Grim Reaper image was doing. The answer: very very well for Mr. Reaper. Not so well for Jason’s bandwidth.

I said that in September of 2006 he was downloaded 212,000 times. For the month of December, he was downloaded 401,000 times. This was going to get a lot worse, I could see that immediately.

The problem wasn’t just academic anymore, either. You see, I’ve been lucky enough to host with a number of good providers over the years, who have treated me well, and eventually I have outgrown them. When that happens, there’s a mad scramble to find new hosting and I have to often host it locally, to the detriment of everyone. Additionally, I am scrambling for the privilege of spending lots of my own money. While this is all fine with me, the “service” I am doing by allowing the hot-linking of images by Myspace is really no service at all.

Myspace is roughly the 4th most visited English language website, according to reports. It is owned by News Corporation. News Corporation is fucking huge. My dad used to work for News Corporation, so I am very appreciative of that but not to the point of happily whistling a tune while they bleed my generous hosting company’s connection dry. Everything, you see, has limits. I hope it’s not like hearing there’s scant evidence of Tooth Fairies to know that I have some of my own.

So, sleepy with egg nog and considering what to do next, I decided I would replace the image.

Initially, I thought an ad for Notacon or Blockparty or the documentary would be good. But the fact is, the vectors just don’t line up. People who are on Myspace are hardly going to be swayed by an ad for something one way or another, and it felt icky.

So I goatse’d them.

If you don’t know what I mean by “Goatse”, then let me go on the record, right now, as saying this is just what Wikipedia is good for. You can go and read up on the history of what “Goatse” is. If you don’t have the time or patience and yet still don’t know what I mean, let me say that it is a disturbing image of a gentleman (it is clear he is a fellow) using almost yoga-like skills to display the eye-watering sight of the inside of his own rectum. If that sounds horrible, it is. It is truly, truly horrible.

This is interesting on its own levels; I don’t know why we didn’t think this through in the early stages of Internet, but the fact is so obvious that to hear it makes you think you always knew it: the pipes can back up sewage. The same open door that gives you a world of knowledge and communication is also a piping hot shit-gun of horror. Like looking to see if a rifle is loaded by peering down the barrel, your screen can turn from a breathtaking visage of insight into a Gatling Gun of mind-scarring infinity-pain within the literal blink of an eye.

Or, as they say: ONCE YOU CLICK, YOU CANNOT UNCLICK.

If you are truly fine with this, then go ahead: See what I replaced the Grim Reaper with.

Anyway, on with the show.

Assuming you find the idea of some errant myspace numbnut faced with a gaping ass entertaining, then you will become first giggly, and then fall aside laughing to know that within an hour I had “goatse’d” 400 people.

Within two days it was 25,000. Twenty five thousand.

We are now up to nearly a hundred thousand viewings of this file in its new ass-o-rama version. I am sure that through libraries, schools, colleges, cubicles, offices, warehouses, the sound of someone’s throat reflexively making a sound not unlike “Uuuuaaaaaghhhghh” has filled the air. The amount of time lost in horrified stares and frantic jabs at the keyboard and mouse to get away, far away must be into the realm of hours by now. Maybe days! Days of slack-jawed horrified faces staring into a big square eyeball. I don’t know, that gets a chortle out of me. I’m easily entertained.

But after the initial thought of this Towering Tidal Wave of Tweener Terror, I started to consider how it had gotten to be so bad in the first place.

And this is where it gets interesting.

Any entity interested in what is called “market share” must eventually expand out into regions of people far outside those would normally patronize that entity. Not to ensure survival, but to ensure growth – which eventually supplants survival as a metric of health. An excellent example of this is air travel: whereas the original passengers on a plane in the first decade of air travel had a reasonably good chance of knowing how to operate that plane (the pilot and his passenger, two air enthusasts trying out a new machine), we are now at the point that we can have 300 individuals inside a jet and less than a handful could possibly operate the thing. That is, less than 1% of the people inside a machine, whose lives depend on that machine and who are paying to use that machine, have any idea how to make it work. This is, ultimately, fine: air travel is very safe and we have lots of safeguards in place so that generally the whole shebang doesn’t explode. Still, you cross a line and the trends will be for even more people packed into an airplane, not less.

This isn’t evil, per se… it’s just how this whole growth thing works. And eventually, this came to the Internet. As college students were dumped onto Internet connections, they faced, essentially, a sea of pilots; people trained to operate the craft who followed some levels of lore and rulesets to keep things running smoothly, if jarringly Libertarian. As these college students flooded the gates around the month of September, they would eventually get assimilated into the Way of Things by a month or two, or sulk away and watch things from afar. Either way, it kind of worked.

And then America On-Line dumped everybody onto the Internet at once. This phenomenon was so marked in Internet history that it even has a name: The September that Never Ended.

There’s a story from that time, which I love to tell, which will have meaning in this entry shortly. Someone put up a webpage about America Online, criticizing the company and the service it provided. It advocated untoward behavior on AOL and generally represented a typical “slam site”, which I myself have been known to take part in from time to time. After the time that AOL was fully loosed on the Internet and sending people willy-nilly around, this site got a letter that I think really underlines the problem with this sort of culture class. An AOL moderator, that is, a guy whose job is to look for troublemakers on the AOL service, contacted this webmastrer, and told him he was violating the AOL terms of service and to cease his website immediately. As far as this mop-head was concerned, AOL now “owned” the Internet and anyone on it, even someone running a site not in any way connected with the AOL service (except in discussing them) was under its jurisdiction. The webmaster did the logical thing: he posted the letter for all to see, garnering ridicule and some thoughtful chuckles.

Myspace, and sites like it, also have to take a tactic similar to the airlines. The somewhat large barrier-to-entry of hosting a website has already been reduced a great deal, but social websites remove it entirely; you only need an e-mail address to be able to host and provide content. And now the whole part where you have to learn enough HTML to be able to make it render in a browser is wiped clean. It is possible, very possible, to go from Tweener at Hot Topic to Webmistress of the Dark and Foreboding Webpage of Sin without ever using a single bracket.

Is this bad? On the one hand, people who would never have had a voice before are given one. On the other, that voice is occasionally droning, illiterate, and borderline schizophrenic. And multiplied by tens of thousands. However, Myspace (and News Corporation) has market share, and that’s the primary goal of the whole activity.

Part of hosting a website is providing the content. While it’s possible to use the internal templates to at least indicate what hobbies you have and whether you like to smoke. folks are naturally inclined to upload pictures, change the color of the background, and add design schemes that make Holly Hobbie look like Prada. To help them, a little cottage industry of templates are now around so that instead of making that huge step into markup languages, patrons can simply copy and paste designs into their own pages.

Here, then is the source of this sudden interest in my website’s artscene section; someone created a “design” that directly hotlinked to the artscene.textfiles.com website and used the image as the background. The design, by the way, is absolutely horrible, and I don’t know how anyone ever found it readable in the first place; the default font color was red, with a line through the text! This said, I’m sure I have a number of pieces of clothing that call into question my qualifications for a fashion police badge.

Soon after I converted the image from Grim Reaper to Grim Ripper, one of the thousands of people getting eye-lashed by the image saw the “textfiles.com” mention at the bottom, figured out how to mail me, and did so:

Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2006 21:45:40 EST
From: Motorjames1@wmconnect.com
To: jason@textfiles.com
Subject: myspace hacking

Hello. Someone is hacking into myspace profiles and claiming to be
"textfiles".com.If you are unaware of this, they are using your
web-name to be quite offensive. I thought you might like to know.
It's a pretty childish, sophmoric stunt {easily cleaned up,} but
annoying.If it happens to actually be you doing it, You should really
hope we never meet- you will end up looking worse than the photo you
have been posting-

This is a fascinating character study on several levels. First of all, there’s the immediate assumption that someone “hacked” myspace. The fact that I used the deadly spell “mv” to shift a few things around on a machine I own is not a possibility as far as Motorjames1 is concerned. Next, just to make sure all bases are covered, he threatens me. Ostensibly he is indicating he will punish me by doing something traumatic to my ass. Perhaps, however, he merely means he will do something to my face so that it will be as horrifyingly offensive as the Goatse ass. Either way, I question his diplomatic skills.

Communiques were quiet on my side for days, and I assumed that people were figuring out how to remove the image and replace it with something else, which is the “cleaning up” that motorjames1 had indicated. Nobody, it seems, was inspired to seek me out. So, I went on a little fact-finding mission of my own. Checking the referrer logs of my webserver, I found places where people were writing helpful notes to their friends to perhaps figure out how they too had been “hacked”. Granted, a lot were in the form of “WHAT T FUK WITH U BACKGROUND??????”, but the essence was clear.

Hotlinking in itself is not so bad, in my book. I certainly get people hotlinking to my textfiles and directories, skipping over my introductions and context to provide others with information that I’m hosting. I even have people link directly to images on the DIGITIZE sub-site to prove a point about catalogs or old computers or so on. But in all these cases, the hotlinking is in the course of providing knowledge. Someone is trying to inform others about a subject and my library is being utilized to share. I feel like this is right and good, and I encourage it.

But what is being done by myspace is that this data is not being used for knowledge. It’s being used as decoration. Beyond that, it’s being used for inefficient, meaningless, taste-lacking decoration, just to give someone’s poorly-written “website” a “dark feeling” by putting a visage of death on it. Maybe that’s an odd, arbitrary line to draw, but after being at the ass-end of that line, if you will, I think I have to consider drawing it.

I was idly wondering today where to go with this, whether to simply refuse to allow myspace pages to hotlink to any images whatsoever, when I received this in my inbox:

Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2007 20:46:11 -0800
From: HotFreeLayouts COM 
To: mailbox@textfiles.com
Subject: hardcore porn pic - take down asap please

hi, you really should take down ASAP

www.textfiles.com/artscene/mirrors/GRAPE-DEMO-ARCHIVE/graphism/rs/razorback/
razorback-the_grim_reaper.png
somebody is flodding our server with that / posting it on myspace
etc.
--
HotFreeLayouts.com Abuse Team

And here we are, back full circle. “Hotfreelayouts” is one of the sites that offers up these design templates for downloads (along with ads, of course), and these fellows, the pilots of the current generation if you will, were utterly unable to do anything about my “flod”. Or my flodding.

Consider, then, what was going on here. Myspace, a site which is being used by people who don’t know how to host or design, ends up with a gaping ass provided by a design firm which can’t understand the nature of hotlinking (or of spelling), who have written to someone who can host, design and spell but are doing so with a demand that this person take action.

And this, my friends, is ass.

2008 Update: Since this weblog entry was first written, it has easily become the most popular entry in the weblog’s history, with hundreds visiting it years later. If this is the first time you’ve read it, be sure to read the related postings:

The Ass-Termath
Goatse II: The Widening
The February Goat Update
Goatse Metrics

Comments (233) left to “Freedom, Justice and a Disturbingly Gaping Ass”

cocovan wrote:

Great story and the whole concept of “pilots” of the intarwebs is a fine way to make the point.

You must be very proud to think that you are personally responsible for Goatse-ing so many people! I know I would be!

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 7:20 am | Permalink
Jough Dempsey wrote:

You could always re-edit the image to contain a link to this page, so that people who think their sites have been hacked could read this story (basic literacy is assumed, of course, which may be giving the li’l’ scamps too much credit).

It’s a beautiful story. I think I may have to change a few images on my servers as well.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 8:24 am | Permalink
Flanker wrote:

Dugg: http://digg.com/tech_news/MySpace_Gets_Goatse_d

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 9:44 am | Permalink
manman wrote:

Haha, nice story.
It’s as if some guy sees a hole and sticks his junk in it then gets hurt.
Don’t blame the person who rightfully made the hole,
you’re suppose to say wth were you thinking sticking yourself in there?
It’s a price you pay for doing something you have no idea about and without any thought.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 9:59 am | Permalink
ZekeDMS wrote:

Wonderful. Simply wonderful. Perhaps it’s just as I hate myspace, but I can’t help but appreciate the line.

And the record goatse-ing.

A friend of mine created a rather famous goatse in Gary’s Mod, using clever headcrab placement, the G-man, and a good secondary camera.

Someone chose not only to steal this and take credit, but to hotlink the image. So he’s stealing it, taking credit, and pulling it directly from my friend’s site.

The image was replaced with the real Goatse, and the text “Don’t steal credit for my work-The_Spaniard”

Yet that mighty act only got 2000 people, at most 2000.

I was astounded by that number until this morning, and learning of your hundred-thousand.

Congratualtions, sir, at pwning the internet.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 10:23 am | Permalink
zack wrote:

This is by far the funniest post I’ve seen in a very long time. Thank you. You and your mv spell.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 10:23 am | Permalink
nitr021 wrote:

Good job on fucking them up!!

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 10:27 am | Permalink
Eric the Red wrote:

“But what is being done by myspace is that this data is not being used for knowledge. It’s being used as decoration. Beyond that, it’s being used for inefficient, meaningless, taste-lacking decoration, just to give someone’s poorly-written “website” a “dark feeling” by putting a visage of death on it. Maybe that’s an odd, arbitrary line to draw, but after being at the ass-end of that line, if you will, I think I have to consider drawing it.”

yes, that IS an odd arbitrary line to draw. What constitutes ‘good use’? Is it for you to say?

Of course, it IS your bandwidth. So you would be entirely in your right to cut off these fucknuts at the knees, and I would probably cheer you on. And heck, I would probably just ban the entire myspace domain. But to say what is and what isn’t valid information/decoration/whatever? Hmmmm.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 10:53 am | Permalink
Jason Scott wrote:

I see it as the difference between someone asking for books you’ve stacked up to read or show others, and someone asking for books because they want to make a little “book fort” out in the woods.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 11:39 am | Permalink
fuzz wrote:

Just in case you don’t already have a prominent enough place in the histories of thar intarwebs, now you can be known as:
“The man who goatse’d MySpace”

nice one mate

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 12:38 pm | Permalink
someone else wrote:

So i had the same problem starting last summer sometime and did the same thing. EXCEPT, instead of goatse, I used the picture of David Hasselhoff and puppies.

good times.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 12:59 pm | Permalink
anony wrote:

just for clarification, motorjames1 did take into account that you changed it yourself: “If it happens to actually be you doing it,”

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 1:28 pm | Permalink
Ged wrote:

Great stuff Jason. Well-written, good character progression (from puckered to goatse’d) and full of wholesome values.

I had a similar problem with an image I did of Janet Jackson and her bizarre breast adornment for b3ta and I believe I used the tubgirl gambit before feeling a small frisson of guilt.

Never got on myspace (not around back then) or ‘the public lavatory wall of the internet’ as I like to call it.

Kudos, my friend.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 1:30 pm | Permalink
IC wrote:

Haha that last comment by Jason reminded me of this: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=13680

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 1:37 pm | Permalink
Jake D. wrote:

Brilliant!

I’m not sure what is worse to goatse someone or tubgirl them. Either way it’s a quick lesson on where to get your content.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 1:38 pm | Permalink
Frac wrote:

I’m no prude, but I think there is an element of “knowingly distributing pornography to a minor” here. You know Myspace is full of kids, and you know that’s where your image is being used.

I’d have gone with something equally embarrassing but less offensive. I like the Hasslehoff and kittens idea… or simply one of those “image stolen from xyz.com” images.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 1:42 pm | Permalink
_mind wrote:

while a bit more work, you could have replaced it with a script that would send either the original image or the goatse image. probably base it off of a hash of the IP and maybe the week or something. maybe the referrer too. keep the population steady while making as many viewers continue to see a picture of an ass as possible. or maybe you just wanted your bandwith back

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 1:45 pm | Permalink
Some Call Me Tim wrote:

I wonder if your “Enter ‘ascii’ here” bot protection will thwart the thousands of mouth breathers that came here via Digg..

Anyway, wonderful story, Jason! I hope the bump in traffic results in some documentary sales for you.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 1:52 pm | Permalink
Omar wrote:

I feel your pain, man. I miss the old Internet. (I say this as I continue to maintain both AOL and Myspace accounts, but hey, it’s the new world order. At least AOL deletes my messages automatically after 30 days.)

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 1:54 pm | Permalink
Will wrote:

Damn that was funny. Made my day. Instant classic!

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 1:55 pm | Permalink
Richard wrote:

Hey, 25,000! I am impressed. That’s a lot of ass.

Richard

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 1:57 pm | Permalink
Sam wrote:

Well played sir, well played indeed.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:01 pm | Permalink
Patrick Grote wrote:

Jason … good for you. I had the same problem a while back and used an image with text in it to let people know what is going on.

Your appended text is fine.

As for distributing porn to a minor, come on. No way.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:02 pm | Permalink
n. nescio wrote:

You, Sir, are an internet hero; and I would let you have me if you wanted. Barring that, I take my hat off to you, sir.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:13 pm | Permalink
TV Online wrote:

blame google images – the idiots at hotlayouts probably just googled skeleton and found your site and image. You can get around this with an htaccess file or you can add a robots.txt file to stop google image bot from indexing your images (your content will still get indexed thankfully).

hotlayouts should get what it reaps for stealing!

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:14 pm | Permalink
gwen wrote:

I probably would have used a 400×400 block of bright red with the “blink” attribute set “on”. Instead of sending an obscene picture, which, while I admit made me giggle my ass off, may well be breaking some obscure liberal-candy-ass “for the chilllldrunnnn” law, just send ‘em something gruesomely inconvenient and potentially epilepsy-triggering.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:15 pm | Permalink
glych wrote:

Heh. I ran into that very same problem from my own site’s wallpaper page (If you’re interested, feel free to read the whole story here, just click back a few posts: http://www.livejournal.com/users/glych/. So what I did was discontinue hotlinking through changing my .htaccess file.

^_^

-glych

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:20 pm | Permalink
Michael Brutsch wrote:

You, sir, are t3h r0Xx0r5. Kudos.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:21 pm | Permalink
Mini Appler wrote:

Congrats Jason! Too damn funny.
As for clicking the link, I wish I hadn’t.. that’s very disturbing.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:31 pm | Permalink
corwin wrote:

I am speechless, both with awe and uncontrollable laughter. I’ve goatse’d a few people in my time, but 25,000! You are, as has been said, an internet hero.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:31 pm | Permalink
Liam wrote:

awesome, just awesome… reading that made my day !

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:37 pm | Permalink
Bill Bradford wrote:

I did the same thing about six months ago, except I just used a .htaccess file to redirect any image hotlink attempts from myspace/livejournal/xanga/etc to variations of goatse and the “Pain” series of pictures.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:39 pm | Permalink
krux wrote:

that is quite awesome!

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:39 pm | Permalink
protocol wrote:

I don’t know why some of you commenting creeps keep insisting that goatse is porn. Does it somehow qualify as erotic to you?

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:43 pm | Permalink
Jacob wrote:

Excellent, Jason. Keep sticking it to the pinheads and myspace kiddies.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:48 pm | Permalink
Tashi wrote:

you just made my morning, good show!

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:49 pm | Permalink
A. Katch wrote:

Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Marry me?

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:54 pm | Permalink
EvilBunnyFuFu wrote:

i love it, and if it continues, one up with the mighty tubgirl.. (www tubgirl com) i’m sure it will stir more of a reaction.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 2:58 pm | Permalink
Folletto Malefico wrote:

That’s simply amazing.

I imagine you going around with a satisfied smile on your face. For weeks.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 3:15 pm | Permalink
the angry gnome wrote:

booo ya! thats all i gotta say to the leechers.

http://www.socalspaces.com

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 3:17 pm | Permalink
Paul Hixson wrote:

I curious as to how quickly the bandwidth sucking problem is resolved. I’d guess you may have just traded a hot-link-vortex clog for a scorn-of-the-lame spam clog.

All The Best

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 3:22 pm | Permalink
rrl wrote:

Eric the Red said: “And heck, I would probably just ban the entire myspace domain”.

What good would that do, Eric? Are you sure that your pilot’s license is up-to-date?

Great read Jason. Well played.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 3:25 pm | Permalink
r@dix wrote:

Very well done
A true ‘shock and awe’ – counterfight :)
(and extremely well written too

*deep bow*

r@dix

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 3:27 pm | Permalink
Flack wrote:

Wow — blink and miss an exciting moment in the life of Jason Scott. I agree — an ad for the demoparty or the documentary would have been tacky and missed the point entirely.

It reminds me free tech support; I don’t mind (much) providing free computer support for friend, it’s when my friends loan me out to their friends where the shotgun pattern begins to reveal itself. Like you, I don’t mind someone hotlinking to a picture on my site for the right reasons, but designing a template that hotlinks? Wow — cajones grande, mi amigos.

I’m a bit more patient though — I think I might have string these people along for a ride. You know, put a Christmas hat on the ‘reaper for Christmas, Easter Eggs around him for Easter, etc.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 3:30 pm | Permalink
LilDebbie wrote:

I give this troll a 10 out of 10. Bravo, sir.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 3:30 pm | Permalink
Bill wrote:

Personally I think you should discuss Theft of Service with HotFreeLayouts.com. They’re stealing your bandwidth for their own profit.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 3:32 pm | Permalink
Frederick Xor wrote:

Your story is absolutely awesome. I hope you update us on any more interesting emails or events concerning your great feat.

All the best,
freddy

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 3:43 pm | Permalink
Bill wrote:

Speaking as someone who remembers the days before “The September that never ends” I have to say this is a unique solution to an age old problem. The internet gods bow to you sir! As do the rest of the webmaster who know what its like to get shafted.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 3:55 pm | Permalink
Chris Boylan wrote:

Saw this on DIGG. Awesome work. I giggled myself silly thinking of the people diving for their browser’s back button. I’ve had sites steal our technology articles verbatim and steal our images as well, but they usually went through the trouble of downloading/moving the image to their own server first – not stupid enough to link to the images directly. We have taken to putting little “watermarks” into our images now, but these do detract from the image.

Anyway, congrats. Good work and may you live to goatse another day!

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 4:10 pm | Permalink
Jimmy wrote:

I think I threw up in my mouth a little after learning what goatse’d means and seeing that pic. Awesome, you rule.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 4:30 pm | Permalink
eno wrote:

I’ve been looking for a new hero. You just got the job.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 4:31 pm | Permalink
Camille wrote:

You’ve just inspired me to use a similar technique to blast people stealing our images. And I really wish I hadn’t clicked on the link to that picture.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 4:34 pm | Permalink
Anonymous Howard wrote:

Suggestion:

1. Speaking of retards, we need a way to DIGG that image!
2. How about serving up the replacement image only to only the first visit by each IP address with an animated non-looping png for the FightClub effect.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 4:35 pm | Permalink
adrian wrote:

Best story I have read lately! Great job sticking it to those jackasses. Not only did they use an image you had created without your permission for their own commercial profit but then they have the nerve to tell you to take that down because they are to inept to do something about it themselves. I believe a big F U is due as a response. The plane analogy was awesome btw !!

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 4:39 pm | Permalink
Greg wrote:

All this because replacing it with “This image has been linked from my site and is wasting my bandwidth” – Please change” would have been, what too humane an action?

You reference the Usenet influx from AOL and the new users apparent lack of social graces to justify your amazing act of social disgracefulness. I doubt this will teach anyone.

However, all the 13yr olds on MySpace now have a new education thanks to you!

You are a real “hero”.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 5:30 pm | Permalink
smurf wrote:

You sir, are an absolute genius. Not just the image removal and replacement but your story.

Brilliance.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 5:40 pm | Permalink
Joe wrote:

Hehe… I am hoping that someone I know now has a gaping a$$ on thier myspace. It is about time we take back the inter-tubes from the noobs! I can’t wait to read about some person who thought they were OMFGHAXXORZ and got the rude awakening that they don’t know squat… and now have to look at a dude’s nether hole!! Haha.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 5:42 pm | Permalink
Allison wrote:

I’m rather proud that I have managed to avoid goatse for so many years now
Kudos on this, and thank you for giving me a reason to definitely not go on myspace anytime soon. (Not that I have lately)

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 5:44 pm | Permalink
Wheezy wrote:

gwen:

You stupid twat, he’s not sending a pornographic image, he has merely changed an image which resides on HIS server — which, get this (and I dunno how those darn liberals could let this happen *rolls eyes*), he has every right to do. You are every bit as clueless as the drooling halfwits he was quoting in his blog. No… actually you’re worse than they are, because he has taken the time to educate you as to what, why, and how he did it, and you’re STILL completely clueless.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 5:47 pm | Permalink
jesus_ wrote:

Marry me and have my babies.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 5:50 pm | Permalink
sandman wrote:

Dead solid perfect.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 5:54 pm | Permalink
Dave wrote:

Man, that is the best story i’ve ever read on the entire internets, and i’ve read all the internets man. I tell you what, your idea deserves applause. *clap* *clap* *clap*

Great work. I love making stupid fucking idiot americans look like even bigger fucking idiots by making them try to figure out how someone hacked there myspace page and put up the goatse guy. You should now put the old image back, hope that people start linking it again, then this time, use the “giver” image. hahahha

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 6:04 pm | Permalink
cassiel wrote:

This article is a whole lot of fun to read. I call this “cinema in your head” – great cinema of course.

But there’s also some deeper meaning:
I suggest to name a new social disease and call it the pilot-passenger-syndrome.
And the whole internet is suffering from this disease. In Jason’s example you can still fight back and have some fun, but when you are faced with stubborn wanna-be-admins at major online-service providers like AOL, T-online, web.de (Germany), who are not able to configure their MTAs RFC compliant, arbitrarily rejecting all your e-mail and patronizing their customers by denying them legitimate e-mail, then it’s no fun at all.

This article confirms me once more that we have more and more admin-passengers, who think because they fly 1st class they know how to fly an airplane. In fact they have no idea how the internet works. They regard the internet as their property. Together with the Spammers they destroy the internet from the front and the rear end.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 6:12 pm | Permalink
Krisjohn wrote:

I obviously don’t hate MySpace enough, because apart from a mild chuckle all I’m thinking is that you missed a great opportunity to advertise something worthy, say your BBS Documentary. You could have edited the image to contain information about the nature of its source and your work, rather than just going for the gross-out.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 6:12 pm | Permalink
DominicanZero wrote:

Jason, I hereby declare you from this point forth a true hero of the intarwebs. You deserve the finest cheeses and wines, my friend. As of this moment, you shall be referred to as “Jason the Goatse’d MySpace hero”. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? =p

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 6:24 pm | Permalink
Red Machine D wrote:

Criminally hilarious. You, sir, pwn.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 6:42 pm | Permalink
Shadus wrote:

How hard is it to just steal the image, you know right click, save as… put it on your site? Instead people are so lame that they feel they must steal the image and the bandwidth.

What ever happened to creativity? Screw the kiddies who got themself goatse’d. I’d do it in a heartbeat if I thought someone was hotlinking my images.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 6:45 pm | Permalink
John S. wrote:

I’m most certain that aforementioned image contributed to many white powdered mascara tear streaked faces that had “thought” how elegant feeling “pain” must be…

Most excellent Sir!

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 6:51 pm | Permalink
Brock wrote:

I haven’t got a good laugh like that in a long time. I haven’t seen the image and I don’t think I want to if it’s anything comparable to the “tubgirl” image that I’m still trying to forget.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 7:13 pm | Permalink
Stacia wrote:

Jason, this is marvelous. I can’t believe you’ve been on waxy, Dugg, and other sites and I didn’t know it until now! As kids these days say, you are teh awsum, and an hero.

I have to confess that I remember that AOL story. I just heard about it and wasn’t directly involved, of course, but it was posted far and wide on Usenet, and resulted in many hearty chuckles. IIRC, it took a long time for AOL to live down.

And Bill, with all due respect, Jason’s goatse’ing isn’t a “unique” solution, it’s simply the most amazingly perfect execution of an old-school solution I’ve ever seen. I, too, was here before the Eternal September, and learned quickly you saved photos you wanted on your own shell account, you didn’t hotlink. (This was, of course, before Photobucket and the like.) People (especially on alt.religion.kibology) kept track of the bandwidth and would replace hotlinked pics with gag ones to teach hotlinkers a lesson, just like Jason did.

As such, I erroneously thought for years that very few people hotlinked; it took me a long while to realize that “hotlinking” meant what it did and that it was a serious problem. I’m shocked that people think it’s okay, that they have such little knowledge of how the Internet and bandwidth works that they think Jason is somehow in the wrong for hosting whatever photos he wants on his own server on his own dime.

The idea that Jason “sent” goatse to those poor innocent myspacers? I can’t even comprehend the ignorance behind that claim.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 7:31 pm | Permalink
Milhouse wrote:

I had the same thing happen to me a few times – in one instance someone was using a football team badge image on my server as their avatar in loads of forums. It was nice to see that avatar on all his postings change to a pic of a guy masturbating.

I wonder if you could sell the “400,000 hits a month” url to someone who wants to advertise on Myspace? Maybe a business opening there – “enter your URL here, and the number of hits you get, and we’ll find someone who’ll pay you to host their banner”

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 7:38 pm | Permalink
John wrote:

I want to have your babies. At least I would, if I was a leidee.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 7:43 pm | Permalink
Jim wrote:

quoting from Jake D.
I’m no prude, but I think there is an element of “knowingly distributing pornography to a minor” here. You know Myspace is full of kids, and you know that’s where your image is being used.

———
That’s pretty much the problem of any site stealing bandwidth. If you hotlink to another site’s images, you’d better realize that you can’t control the result. The thieves are stealing the bandwidth and presenting it as their site, which means they are presenting the image to children, not textfiles.com.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 7:52 pm | Permalink
David Gerard wrote:

Sir, I take back every untoward thing I have ever said about you anywhere.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 7:53 pm | Permalink
juan wrote:

Don’t ever take the image down or change it or anything…

…and save tubgirl for next time someone pulls that sorta thing!

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 8:03 pm | Permalink
mark wrote:

you mention you can design, but then you run a horrid colour scheme like a black background and blazing white text that blurrs and shines like a light bulb. I don’t like reading light bulbs.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 8:18 pm | Permalink
Jordan wrote:

I loved the blog man, what you did was fucking awesome! I laughed so hard reading the whole thing. I think you should have taken the HotFreeLayouts thing further though… those guys are telling you to take down a picture ASAP and saying it’s “abuse”. However the real abuse is them stealing your bandwith and pictures, especially without crediting you. It would have been great if you threatened them for it =D

I wish that would have happened to one of my friend’s profiles… I would have laughed my ass off. I’ve spent enough time on the internet to be desnsitized to 99% of the stuff ou tthere… I think I just woulda burst out laughin.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 8:23 pm | Permalink
fishmech wrote:

you mention you can design, but then you run a horrid colour scheme like a black background and blazing white text that blurrs and shines like a light bulb. I don’t like reading light bulbs.
———————————————-

Well, Mark, it’s in keeping with how people used to read textfiles and BBS’s back in the early 90′s, black background/white or green text.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 8:30 pm | Permalink
NoxiousGas wrote:

“The idea that Jason “sent” goatse to those poor innocent myspacers? I can’t even comprehend the ignorance behind that claim.”

Well, you seem to have trouble comprehending the law too. The anti-porn laws the do-gooders have passed recently make it illegal to transmit naughty images to minors. He’d have a whole lot of trouble claiming he didn’t. He knows minors are the main MySpace demographic. He intentionally caused them to receive obscene images (we can all agree that goatse is obscene, right?). He’s running the risk that just one of the 25,000 people who got goatse’d tells their parents, who complain to myspace, who sell the guy out to the cops. At that point, this is the kind of case that DA’s dream of, and explaining the intricacies of hotlinking to a jury with my freedom at stake wouldn’t be fun. Not to mention, he very well may have violated the original intent of the law in the first place.

That said, I loved it. Serves the little thieves right.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 8:38 pm | Permalink
axx wrote:

absolutely great!
enjoyed it tremendously, will come back for more..
count me as a fan

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 8:42 pm | Permalink
RaD Man wrote:

WHAT T FUK WITH U BACKGROUND?????? U SARDINED IT MAN!!!!

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 9:05 pm | Permalink
Frederick Xor wrote:

He could always explain hotlinking to the jury like this:

His image and the internet lie at the opposite ends of a bridge. In order for anyone using the internet to access his image they have to cross the bridge. If he wants people to view anything (like his site) that he has on his side of the bridge, he has to pay the tolls for those people. When people are not viewing his content as he intended, he still has no choice but to pay their tolls. In order to discourage them from crossing his bridge and forcing them to pay tolls, he put the offensive image up. The only people who happen to look at the image are the people who he doesn’t want to visit.

Of course, my explanation might need a little adaptation and clarification, but I think the jury might understand it if you make it clearer.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 9:17 pm | Permalink
eccles wrote:

I feel your pain – I get forum weenies linking to my images and chewing many megs of bandwidth. I solved it with Rewrite engine in apache, and direct them to another image. At various points I’ve used porn, but I realised it was still chewing my bandwidth, so I switched to a 10000*1 white png. That didn’t help much, so now its a 200*200 animated gif of /pain/.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 9:31 pm | Permalink
Reed wrote:

I think those speaking to some obscure porn law are incorrect. The man is mearly changing the content on his server. He isn’t intentionally distributing anything. The MeatSpacers and layout people are the ones linking to the image.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 9:59 pm | Permalink
Admiral ZEX wrote:

This could be the greatest thing I’ve ever read on the Internet.

Well, maybe not, but it’s the best example of “justice served” I’ve seen in a very long time.

My wife pointed out something that I think is totally true – your little substitution caused the goatseing of the one group of people who probably most needed to be goatsed.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 10:00 pm | Permalink
RedWolf wrote:

Excellent post, my friend — and a hilarious story. I once did a similar thing a few years ago when several discussion forums were linking directly to custom user rank images which I had created specifically for an old site of mine. In my case, I used hardcore gay porn instead of Goatse, with the same intention as you. The bandwidth thieves got the message quickly and changed the images within a day…but your story is especially hilarious because nobody knows how to change it!

Speaking of Goatse, I wrote and recorded a song about it (called “Traumatized by Goatse”) back in 2003 which you might enjoy:

http://www.request-a-song.com/songs/viewsong.php?songid=30

Then again, you might not. But this story just made me remember it myself.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 10:27 pm | Permalink
bobSharpe wrote:

You should not do magic you do not understand!!!

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 10:29 pm | Permalink
Anonymous wrote:

Why is taking technology for grated bad? OT1H, I think people should be able to rely on a link to remain stable, or atleast non-offensive.
OTOH, if it becomes a problem, (bandwidth…etc.) why not just break the link?

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 10:32 pm | Permalink
Chip wrote:

As much as I hate Myspace and its users, what you did was cruel. Sure it was an amusing prank (a good read) but I know children as young as 10 who use Myspace frequently. These kids don’t understand that what they copy from layout sites may contain hotlinked images, and that’s understandable. Your issue was with the site offering your image in their layouts, not with the users. If you wanted to shock people using your image, maybe something a little less obscene like the pumpkin goatse would have been a better choice?

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 10:34 pm | Permalink
Ryan Russell wrote:

So, you reconsidered my question about why you didn’t goatse them.

And now you’ve got the digg crowd posting all over your journal. Ah, full circle.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 10:47 pm | Permalink
Teresa wrote:

There should be a tutorial on myspace that warns about hotlinking. Really, that’s what photobucket was made for, so that everyone could host their own images for free and not steal bandwidth. That being said, I am really curious what this picture of the reaper looked like.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 11:04 pm | Permalink
vlekk wrote:

flippin’ brilliant man

[mostly the article...but also renaming hello.jpg]

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 11:10 pm | Permalink
Shaw Starr wrote:

wahahaha! Brilliant Jason! ‘Gorifying’ 25,000 kids is hilarious. You sir have just made my Friday morning great. Those myspace kids can have their own intarweb but not this one

Ubergeekness forever. The Internet would be better without lusers.

Posted on 04-Jan-07 at 11:18 pm | Permalink
David wrote:

It is pretty funny…

But then I have to wonder how many poor innocent 13 year old goth girls who only wanted a cute picture of the grim reaper on their myspace are now scarred for life. Yes, you probably shouldn’t hotlink to images you have no control, and this is most definitely a known risk, but perhaps teaching the lesson by goatseing them is not the best way of going about things. And how many teenage boys are now in scalding hot water (or very awkward conversations) with their mothers because they caught their boys unintentionally looking at a gaping ass and dangling cock. Seems an awfully harsh punishment for some bandwidth consumption and tastelessly decorated websites.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 12:21 am | Permalink
Dan wrote:

Perfection.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 12:39 am | Permalink
THE NIGHTSTALKER wrote:

Scott Sensei:

I bow thrice in thy honored direction!

You have won the Internet.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 1:00 am | Permalink
Mark Crocker wrote:

This reminds me of a signature of one slashdot user:

In the beginning the Internet was a bunch of smart users with dumb terminals. Now…

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 1:03 am | Permalink
Josh wrote:

Great post!

Simply amazing the reactions that you got from the myspacer and the design “organization.”

Keep up the great work!

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 1:22 am | Permalink
Carl Brewer wrote:

You, sir, qualify as BOFH. Superb.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 1:53 am | Permalink
Legion wrote:

I ROFLcoptered.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 1:57 am | Permalink
Mia wrote:

Hahah, good for you for doing that! I can’t believe what idiots those people are, who emailed you. Geez! By the way, your writing and sense of humor is great, I love the way you wrote this up.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 2:08 am | Permalink
reeses wrote:

I first started making custom images for each deep-linker with context-appropriate text like,”Bob sucks underaged monkey shlong,” but I got lazy and started using Mr. Goatse.

It’s tremendously gratifying to look at goatse referrers after the switch and seeing people’s comments.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 2:11 am | Permalink
Daft wrote:

Dude, at least use some BMEzine stuff to really shock them, goatse is tame.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 3:28 am | Permalink
Iain Norman wrote:

What a fantastic goatse-ing. Over a hundred thousand people, t’is a sight to behold no less.

“OMG I’ve ben hacked!!!111″

*grins*

I loved the airplane analogy.

For a really disturbing goatse experience try printing it out on an inkjet. We did that once to send to someone that kept spamming us with invoices we hadn’t put orders in for. I thought I’d got used to Goatse by that time and no longer found it shocking, that’s until I saw it in the full glory of shining wet inkjet!

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 4:26 am | Permalink
Leon wrote:

Great post. The responses you published certainly say a lot about the users and distributors of content at places like MySpace.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 4:36 am | Permalink
Phil McClure wrote:

For all of you people weeping over kids seeing the goatse’d image, it’s HotFreeLayouts fault NOT textfiles fault. These kids got their layout from HotFreeLayouts NOT textfiles.

If you bought stolen merchandise from a retailer who knew it was stolen, is it the retailers fault, or is it the fault of the guy from whom the merchandise was stolen?

Continuing in this vein, could he have linked to a more tame version, or redirected the hotlinked image to an article on the social mores of such a practice? Yeah, he could’ve. Would it have been as effective, no it wouldn’t.

If you swap out an image with something morally reprehensible and it appears right next to the posters handle, if they care *anything* about their social standing in that forum, they’ll change it quick. Similarly, if they don’t want mom and dad to kick their ass, they’ll also figure out how to change it quick.

Broken images, ads, and cutesy little “don’t steal my bandwidth” images all sound like good deterrent methods, but they’re not. I can say that with some authority from all of the hotlinked images from livejournal, xanga and their ilk.

Let’s see how many of you people that want to lay the responsibility down at this man’s feet, have the testicular fortitude to cough up the coin to pay for his bandwidth overage fees.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 4:37 am | Permalink
Maan Ashgar wrote:

A great story, I was pointed to it by one of my friends. I totally agree on the pilots concept. I was thinking of linking this story but the image link ….. well, you know

Thank you for a great read.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 6:22 am | Permalink
Julia wrote:

I find this to be very funny. I’ve learned a lot today…not only about how the internet works (as a relative noobie myself) but…ahem…what goatse and tubgirl look like. Thanks for sharing!

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 9:08 am | Permalink
Mike G wrote:

Carl Brewer had it exactly right: You are The BOFH! Your article read like a BOFH story, but with the added wonderment that it was for real!

Praise the interwebian space lords for Jason Scott.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 9:19 am | Permalink
AustinTX wrote:

Hilarious! I did something similar when a certain twat in a discussion board hotlinked my avatar to annoy me. After changing the address of my own avatar, I replaced the original file with that animated graphic of the fat, laughing retarded girl wobbling around. =P

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 10:53 am | Permalink
AustinTX wrote:

I forgot to mention that, coincidently, my avatar is “goatse inspired” (though safe for work). Click my name to see it on my blog page.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 10:55 am | Permalink
Wah wrote:

May I be the third and deciding comment to confer upon you the status of “Living, Breathing, BOFH”.

Congrats. Good story, great metaphors, and more educated newbies.

If you keep this up, we might someday make it to October.

/for the whiners…hush…take a lesson…learn how to fly.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 1:06 pm | Permalink
Vince wrote:

This made me smile all day, but it would have been interesting to set up a cron job that replaced the image periodically and increased the duration gradually and then watch how it either all blows up or traffic changes.

For example, this week, for exactly one minute of every hour, it’s mr goatse. Next week, it’s mr goatse for two minutes per hour, then three, etc.

Alternately, I’m sure theres some apache module that could rotate based on number of page views, or a log watcher that could watch your access.log and rotate the pic every x views…

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 1:45 pm | Permalink
Echilon wrote:

You sir, have inspired me. I decided to take a little myspace revenge myself: http://leghumped.com/blog/2007/01/05/stop-stealing-my-bandwidth/

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 2:31 pm | Permalink
Sonley wrote:

The use of the Internet by children should equate to the use of guns by children; the parents should know what the kids have in their hands…
Sconley

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 2:45 pm | Permalink
Lazlo Nibble wrote:

Congratulations, Jason, on passing up the opportunity to solve this problem through some silent invisible nerdy magic (.htaccess, etc.) and instead using it to implement Consequences. I’m a *big* fan of Consequences.

“Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can’t help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime: the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.” (Robert A. Heinlein)

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 3:38 pm | Permalink
Shii wrote:

Vince, that’s just cruel.

Everyone who’s been complaining about goatse: go back to 1996.

Goatse is Internet culture. It is the universal symbol for “fuck you” among actual Netizens, perhaps as opposed to Digg users. Jason’s was the perfect goatse: done for an appropriate reason, and pulled off with style, on the correct audience (clueless and unsuspecting kids), to achieve a perfectly legitimate result. Maybe now these kids on MySpace will think twice about taking random pictures from people’s websites. An advertisement, like the kind Imageshack or Photobucket send you when you’re out of bandwidth, would have been a crass bow to commerce. A blinking GIF might have been slightly annoying but would not have gotten the proper message across: bandwidth costs money, so host it yourself.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 4:29 pm | Permalink
Mithyus wrote:

Ownage.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 4:50 pm | Permalink
the quizza wrote:

Agree 100% dude, well done.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 5:19 pm | Permalink
Stacia wrote:

NoxiousGas, it was a photo on his own website. It’s not even a photo he uses for design, IIRC, it’s in an archived list. He changed HIS OWN content on HIS OWN site and did not distribute it. That HotFreeLayouts place did the distributing, and they were apparently making money off of using others’ images without permission, and hotlinking as well.

Further, the entirety of humanity that is on the ‘net should not be forced to put only G-rated materials on their site because some poor unsupervised 10 year old might stumble across it. That’s ludicrous. If anyone complained, they’re probably complaining to MySpace, because they don’t understand that this image isn’t really part of the MySpace “website”.

But, yeah, other than that, I totally believe your massive lawyerly knowledge, dude.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 8:38 pm | Permalink
Bill wrote:

The problem I have is that it punishes the wrong people. People viewing the site (including a high number of minors) are the main ones hit, followed by those who used the design. The real people you want to punish are at the design company.

Also, if this was a goth layout, an image from KittenWar could have been just as effective in embarrassing those who used the design.

Posted on 05-Jan-07 at 10:32 pm | Permalink
shar wrote:

gah… I had not seen goaste or tubgirl before. Goatse is gross but tubgirl is indescribably uk! surely she’s poisoned herself & died? God I hope so.
On the other hand, I found your article extremely interesting Jason (although I wish I’d not ‘click’ed or become curious about tubgirl). I like the dry sarcasm that permeates your rant, and I especially love the revenge being exacted. Serves the buggers right!

Posted on 06-Jan-07 at 12:19 am | Permalink
Maaatt wrote:

Good read! I enjoyed it very much. I’d love to see the Grim Reaper image that got so much attention, though – No big deal, however.

“I haven’t laughed that hard since i was a little girl, thank you” – Dr. Evil

Posted on 06-Jan-07 at 3:05 am | Permalink
Matt Sharpe wrote:

really excellent story, well done.

Posted on 06-Jan-07 at 10:34 am | Permalink
diamond_star wrote:

Beautiful…just beautiful. Keep up the good work! Kinda reminds me when a friend of mine renamed a bunch of Slayer songs as Gospel songs and made them readily available for download on LimeWire, Napster, BearShare, etc…
Outstanding

Posted on 06-Jan-07 at 2:19 pm | Permalink
Greg wrote:

Lovely post. Maybe intelligence has won a battle after all.

Posted on 06-Jan-07 at 7:51 pm | Permalink
Afshin wrote:

I’m glad you took the time to document this – just traumatizing the MySpace crowd (and the “design” firm that used your original image) would have been sufficient, perhaps, but the public explanation is important. Too funny.

Posted on 06-Jan-07 at 9:45 pm | Permalink
Giorgia wrote:

I feel like the point needs to be brought up that Myspace is not actually open to 10-year-olds, or really anyone under the age of something like 14. If someone younger is lying about their age to use the site, then maybe this will simply teach them a lesson about why there are age limits on things at all.

Posted on 07-Jan-07 at 12:25 am | Permalink
James Dickens wrote:

now imagine how we could change myspace, get the 10 top 50 hotlinked sites to change images, just about every myspace generated page would be effected and it wouldn’t even have to be goatse or porn, they could just put an interesting graphic about how the user is leaving myspace and moving to facebook or some other site. I wonder how long before myspace took action as there traffic goes down as people move to other sites because of the recommendation of the hotlinked files.

Posted on 07-Jan-07 at 5:24 pm | Permalink
wayfinder wrote:

Good going! I was in a similar position a while ago: I am the author of hitlermelon.gif and people were causing EXTRAORDINARY amounts of traffic by hotlinking it from my hosting (I think the most hits came from a guy who was a very prolific poster on empornium and had chosen hitlermelon as his avatar). My hosting is provided by a friend who understandably got a little fidgety. I did not end up substituting a porn image for it, just a huge epilepsy-inducing red and green HI! which took up very little disk space even at 800×600 px. No reactions from disgruntled leechers so far

Posted on 08-Jan-07 at 10:21 am | Permalink
Tobias Hoellrich wrote:

Great job, Jason! I had originally also a slighly offensive replacement image on my site (see http://www.kahunaburger.com/2006/09/15/enough-hot-linking-already/), but changed that after I received too many hate mails from concerned parents who said that I exposed their children to pornography.

The fun thing is: the hot-linker still has the “good” image in his cache and the page looks correct to him, however others see the replaced version

Posted on 08-Jan-07 at 10:37 am | Permalink
Wank wrote:

“The problem I have is that it punishes the wrong people. People viewing the site (including a high number of minors) are the main ones hit, followed by those who used the design. The real people you want to punish are at the design company.”

Except that the design company was also hotlinking the image so it hit them at some point. Notice their email to him.

Kudos to Jason for utilizing an effective method for educating people about the dangers of hotlinking.

Posted on 08-Jan-07 at 5:40 pm | Permalink
Me wrote:

You should put a 401 authenticate header on it and see how much myspace accounts you can hijack!

Posted on 09-Jan-07 at 7:56 am | Permalink
Me wrote:

You should put a 401 authenticate header on it and see how much myspace accounts you can hijack!

Posted on 09-Jan-07 at 8:03 am | Permalink
hairmare wrote:

history is being written here mass goatseing on a global scale!

Posted on 09-Jan-07 at 6:16 pm | Permalink
Frederik wrote:

good move you are right i laughed my ass off

they call that total pwn@ge hahahahahahahahaha

and yes you are complletely right don’t hotlink that what is not yours ask permission to use the image on your own space with a credit to the maker often gets the full granting of the use and it is nice to have some feedback through this

i laughed really big time lol

Posted on 10-Jan-07 at 6:53 am | Permalink
Fogey1965 wrote:

A) Fabulous.
B) Where is “see figure one”? I expect to find these things at a place called “textfiles.com”

Posted on 10-Jan-07 at 7:48 pm | Permalink
Leech wrote:

Reminds me of what some guy did to a ZDNet reporter who he caught hotlinking a couple years back:

http://www.bryantchoung.com/archives/2005/12/dont_leach_band.shtml

Posted on 11-Jan-07 at 12:14 am | Permalink
iconoclast_tm wrote:

Beautiful. As a veteran dating back to the BBS days, I too am disappointed at what the ‘net has become. People like you, however, make it worth wading through all the bullshit. I’d like to nominate you for the next Jesus. By the way, check out cockeyed.com, somewhere on there is an article about that site’s webmaster doing something similiar (although his revenge is not nearly as sweet or hilarious as yours).

Posted on 11-Jan-07 at 6:23 pm | Permalink
Patrick Legacy wrote:

Jason Scott is my hero.

Posted on 11-Jan-07 at 8:15 pm | Permalink
Tiny wrote:

“why is taking technology for grated bad?”

Why? Because of things like this! Computers have been so dumbed-down so that retards who have no idea what they are doing can play with e-mail and chat rooms. And blogs… can’t forget the blogs. (Trust me, i’m the dial-up/e-mail tech *read: newest guy gets the bitch work* at the isp i work at) and if anyone out there has ever worked tech support, you know why idiots should not have computers. I advocate a return to command-line! Then there will be no pretty pictures to attract the dumb ones!

Posted on 12-Jan-07 at 3:44 pm | Permalink
Richard wrote:

Nice pwnage mate.

Posted on 13-Jan-07 at 8:15 pm | Permalink
Jessica wrote:

You, sir, are a bonafide genius. Thanks for making the internet just a bit safer for those of us with brains. *applause*

Posted on 13-Jan-07 at 8:28 pm | Permalink
Derik Price wrote:

All our anus are belong to you!
Fricken genius dude!

Posted on 13-Jan-07 at 9:09 pm | Permalink
Thaily wrote:

I also replace images which are being hotlinked from my server, usually with explicit (and gross) sexual images.
Then I contact the service provider for the blog and complain about the explicit sexual image being reposted publically and the hotlinker’s blog is deleted.
End of problem :3

Posted on 14-Jan-07 at 4:26 am | Permalink
Koos van den Hout wrote:

I had the problem first with some wannabe internet-stalker linking to my images. Fixed that with an apache referrercheck. A while later, the same thing happened in a different location and I wrote a generic rule replacing images with ‘foreign’ referrers with a ‘stealing bandwidth is lame’ image. This resulted in flames and stupid discussions on fark. Nowadays I point to a page where I kindly thank people for their interest in linking to one of my images but would they be so kind to get in touch first about the rates to cover for bandwidth costs. Nobody has flamed me, annoyed me .. or asked for the rates. Yet.

Posted on 14-Jan-07 at 6:39 am | Permalink
hegglar wrote:

3 tons of respect!

Posted on 14-Jan-07 at 8:41 am | Permalink
Lev Lafayette wrote:

I second the suggestion of a 401 authentication on technical grounds.

I also applaud Thaily’s social engineering skills.

Posted on 14-Jan-07 at 9:13 pm | Permalink
Davisrei wrote:

Wow, those pirates really are stupid. I though that possibly they were using a full code download to the customer, in which case they would have had to force everyone to download a “fixed” version, but they are simply using a redirected STYLE tag. That should be an ammazingly easy fix.

Posted on 15-Jan-07 at 7:57 pm | Permalink
Trash wrote:

I believe you also needed to execute chown us:us -R ./base along with the MV spell .
I hate hotlinkers too so I download the image and host it on my own PC

Posted on 15-Jan-07 at 9:44 pm | Permalink
bleeber wrote:

Awesome job, but I have a geek question:

Which caused more traffic,hotlinking death or this story being dugg?

Posted on 16-Jan-07 at 6:36 am | Permalink
rdm wrote:

It is at once a relief and a dread that the BOFH nature is alive and well.

Well done.

And I pray that I never become an object of your ire.

-R

Posted on 16-Jan-07 at 5:08 pm | Permalink
John wrote:

do take down motorjames’ email address, sporto. he just tryin’ to make sense of the world. if you’re saying hotfreelayouts hyperlinked your image and the new layout was immensely popular, that’s amusing. it’s not clear how your image impacted hotfreelayouts servers, unless they proxy bits or something.

Posted on 17-Jan-07 at 9:01 pm | Permalink
Megatron wrote:

Well done, man. Well done.

Posted on 17-Jan-07 at 11:46 pm | Permalink
vernes wrote:

I remember still dailing into bbs’s.

And I hope your prank will be used in many, many articles about hotlinking.

Posted on 20-Jan-07 at 8:21 am | Permalink
Naruki wrote:

Analogy for explaining hotlinking to a court:

Imagine you find a hole drilled into your bathroom wall, presenting a fine view of your shower to anyone peering in from the sidewalk outside.

You go out to the sidewalk and find that some entrepreneur, drill in hand, is advertising the rights to come view this “free porn” to an extremely busy lunchtime crowd. Thousands of people are peering in.

So you tape a picture of goatse over the hole.

And now a lot of “concerned citizens” are complaining about your actions.

Posted on 20-Jan-07 at 8:43 pm | Permalink
Alex wrote:

Excellent prank! Something for me to remember should I ever put something useful on my site and have it hotlinked all over the Internet.

Back at Uni I had problems with people hotlinking to various sub-pages which were only supposed to be viewed via a PHP include and were moved around quite a lot. Eventually I got sick of idiots whining about dead links and just installed a goatse 404 page.

Given that I have a bot to look for dead links, the only reason for getting that 404 is an outdated hotlink. It does of course get disabled when I change the page structure.

Posted on 23-Jan-07 at 2:25 am | Permalink
Hans wrote:

It is, indeed, still September. Thank you for taking this humorous action as well as writing about it.

Posted on 28-Jan-07 at 6:40 pm | Permalink
Eric wrote:

You made my day. WELL DONE!

Posted on 30-Jan-07 at 12:40 am | Permalink
x-f wrote:

Holy flerking schnitt, Batman!
Great story.
My website has been hotlinked from MySpace too.
Unfortunately I wasn’t that creative as you are. But the next time.. :>

Posted on 31-Jan-07 at 2:17 am | Permalink
kip wrote:

fuck’n hell my eyes hurt, get a fuck’n CSS up in here that doesn’t burn. dipshit

Posted on 31-Jan-07 at 7:31 pm | Permalink
Douglas wrote:

Ahaha Good job man. Wonder what they would do if you put the lemon party image in it’s place.

Posted on 03-Feb-07 at 11:04 pm | Permalink
Kyle wrote:

I had this exact same thing happen to me (but on a lesser scale) and I intensely debated doing the very same thing you did. I ended up using this image.

I “blogged about it and got emails from the people using it similar to yours. The seemingly willful ignorance of some people is amazing.

Posted on 05-Feb-07 at 5:58 pm | Permalink
Frago wrote:

That’s some serious pwn@ge there dude! I’m sure the self appointed geeks @ HotFreeLayouts have sh!t their pants!! I cant imagine that buissness is as good as it was before your image swap! Serves them right!

If you ever need to explain this to a jury… try this:

I had a huge diamond on display in my computer. Some d!ckweeds came and stole the whole display! These a-holes were sneaking it out and using it in their display as their diamond!! I found out my diamond was no longer secure, so I changed the diamond for a fake! They stole the fake. The world is in an uproar because they SHOWED the fake and got caught!!

Posted on 06-Feb-07 at 3:05 pm | Permalink
themyspacefreak wrote:

Thanks fot the great writing man!

Posted on 07-Feb-07 at 3:26 am | Permalink
Yakwhacker wrote:

Amazing. Inspiring. Awesome.

Posted on 08-Feb-07 at 3:13 pm | Permalink
Willow wrote:

No tubgirl?

Posted on 11-Feb-07 at 8:05 am | Permalink
wishfulthoinker wrote:

People. People!!! peeepppllleee!!!

you missed a new word being added to the lexicon today.

“eye-lashed”. I’m stealing it and claiming it for my own. I hotlinked to textfiles.com and all my users got eye-lashed by goatse.

That was a heck of an eyelashing we got when tubgirl showed us her special ‘talent’

Motorjames1@wmconnect.com, tubgirl sends you her regards

Posted on 12-Feb-07 at 6:23 pm | Permalink
batman wrote:

Win.

Posted on 27-Feb-07 at 2:00 pm | Permalink
garfunkle wrote:

SO where is the original file? I saw a preview of it on google images, and it looks awesome.

Posted on 04-Mar-07 at 4:38 pm | Permalink
commodorejohn wrote:

Sir, you are my new hero.

Posted on 02-Apr-07 at 9:15 am | Permalink
deejay wrote:

A couple years ago some wannabe goth chickie used a Byzantine Chant mp3 I had made as her MySpace background sound. I used an Apache rule to redirect to a MIDI file of the Macarena.

As of last month nobody is accessing it anymore.

Posted on 10-Apr-07 at 5:50 pm | Permalink
boxd wrote:

i literally have tears in my eyes. thank you for entertaining me and damn you for providing the avenue to see that ghASStly image again.

haha

=P

- boxd

Posted on 10-Apr-07 at 6:34 pm | Permalink
nahtass wrote:

Well then…

Nice job. I applaud you for standing up to myspace. I am so glad I read your story instead of going there tonight.

Indeed, since originally introduced to Goatse by frisky programing co-workers, I am now using this word as a reference to “pulling it out of your/my ass”.

Often I find myself performing a verbal equivalent.

As a tribute to the power of vulgarity I am considering adding goatse to my spell check dictionary.

Still undecided.

–Nahtass

Posted on 12-Apr-07 at 1:02 am | Permalink
KageSpartan wrote:

Nice one… I would probably have used Tubgirl myself, but that… That rocked. Nice to see Hotlinkers and Image Thieves get their asses ripped open every once in awhile.HotFreeLayouts should keep their mitts off the Bandwidth of others, and start using their own. It’s only fair, y’now. Way to pwn them, man.

Posted on 16-Apr-07 at 2:34 am | Permalink
Ace42 wrote:

While I try to avoid hotlinking wherever possible, it does raise the question of “netiquette”. If you see an amusing stand-alone image (and the Internet is probably 90% people creating ‘amusing’ images) in a thread, do you “hotlink” it to a forum, and risk ruining someone’s bandwidth if it becomes insanely popular, or copy and host it yourself only to then be accused of “stealing” it? They created it to be “seen” obviously, and if it’s cached then it won’t be downloaded more than people will see it (thus it’s being downloaded by the same number of people, roughly, as would have taken up the bandwidth if you’d merely given them a home-page hypertext link to follow to the picture). On the other hand, it is perpetually being viewed by everyone who checks the thread it’s in, whether they want to see the picture (and take up the bandwidth) or not.

Where does the “stealing” it / “Hot Linking” it / “forgetting” about it lines lie?

At what point do you go “If it’s going to waste so much bandwidth, and cause so much grief hunting up the current hoster (who has possibly ripped it from somewhere else themself) to ask permission to rehost it for an off-the-cuff forum post, I won’t even bother” ?

And is there any justification in saying “I wasn’t passing it off as mine, people were free to check the URL and visit the home site if it piqued an interest in its original context” ?

I mean, clearly there is no excuse for inconsideracy or theft, on the other hand material is posted to the internet for the purpose of it being viewed, and hotlinking and IMG tags are a purpose built method for doing so, and how much cause is there for complaint when people end up doing so, especially given the invisible “tech-wizardy” methods for simply denying access without embarrassing someone who may simply be naively trying to disseminate material they think the creator / hoster would be glad to have interest generated in…

Thoughts?

Posted on 23-Apr-07 at 7:59 pm | Permalink
Ace42 wrote:

A bit of a post script here, surely an IMG tagged hotlink to an image is superior to a hypertext link, at least from the “viewers” perspective, in that a single text link in an “image” thread could easily be mistaken for spam advertising, even if the image is “on topic”, whereas the picture’s content (and thus relevence) can easily be seen if tagged.

Although, of course, the flipside is the bandwidth issue, etc.

Posted on 23-Apr-07 at 8:15 pm | Permalink
Havok wrote:

I did a similar thing when i found that a jpop mp3 someone had sent me on irc and that i had left on my shell account was being linked from several free mp3 sites and then many profiles on various social networking sites.. i replaced the mp3 with a small low bit rated GG Allin punk song called “assfucking”

Posted on 25-Apr-07 at 4:37 am | Permalink
Daniel wrote:

me too.

Posted on 27-Apr-07 at 11:47 am | Permalink
Jasonsan wrote:

That’s one of the greatest Internet pranks I’ve heard of in a long time. Thank you.

Posted on 02-May-07 at 8:25 am | Permalink
anonymous wrote:

I’d have used a picture of hitler

Posted on 02-May-07 at 5:24 pm | Permalink
Joe Zimmer wrote:

Damn… Goatse in 2007? Oh come on, maybe it’s new for the MySpace kids but you should have some creativity!

Posted on 02-May-07 at 9:07 pm | Permalink
steven m s wrote:

you sir, are my hero!

Posted on 05-May-07 at 1:28 am | Permalink
Anonymous wrote:

May I direct you towards: http://d1rtyf1lthy.livejournal.com/257310.html

The more recent posts deal with the ‘repercussions’.

Viva le goatse!

Posted on 16-May-07 at 3:58 am | Permalink
Adam wrote:

Sorry, but as a long time internet user, I have to say that I thing you’ve acted like an asshole.

You put something on the web. People linked to it. Duh! That’s the fucking *point* of the web.

If I see an image on the web and like it and think it would look good, what are my options?

1) Copy the image to my own server and link from there.

Or not. That’s copyright infringement and is wrong, no matter how you look at it. (Unless the image has a suitable CC license, obviously)

2) Find contact details from the owner, and ask them if you can link to it.

And get a “Duh! This is the web. You’re *supposed* to link to things dumbass. That’s the *point* of the web.” reply. Really, you don’t need permission to link to something on the web. The fact it’s on the web gives you implicit permission to link to it. If the owner didn’t want it linked to, they would not have put it on the web. (Apparently, there are some webmasters who don’t believe this, but they’re in the set of “non-pilots” you describe)

3) Just link to it.

Tell other people browsers to go fetch the image from where you got it from. Yup, that’s how the web *works*. That’s how it was *designed to work* If the owner doesn’t want other people to get the image, there are plenty of ways for them to accomplish this. Just tell your webserver not to serve resources to anyone you don’t want to serve it to. You can do this by restricting by IP address, or HTTP referer [sic], or by User-Agent if you want.

Or if you have a problem with some of the people who link to you, *despite this being the point of the web*, you could try contacting them, pointing out how much bandwidth this is costing you, and trying to come to some form of arrangement.

OK, I’ll agree that HotFreeLayouts (as well as any other design companies that might have used your image) have been bigger assholes than you here. And that they really *should* know better. And that they *should* have contacted you before incorporating one of your images into a design.

But, we’re talking about you here. You could have decided to just not serve the image (404ing it) if requested with a MySpace referer.

No, you had to go “punish”/shock/whatever a whole bunch of people who were just using the web the way it was meant to be used, taking advantage of the facilities it was designed to provide from the start, without any warning whatsoever.

Asshole.

Posted on 19-Jun-07 at 11:14 am | Permalink
Gernot Hassenpflug wrote:

To those who complain about minors and all. Let’s not be silly and pretend the internet is simple. Where’s that “no fingerpoken” text again? As my Israeli friends say, “stupid must pay”, that’s the real world. If minors get on a computer without learning how to use it, tough shit. Each person should be responsible for what they do, and if they can’t handle that, they should not be there, simple. MySpace…puke.

Posted on 19-Jun-07 at 9:27 pm | Permalink
Kevin Mark wrote:

Hehe. Maybe folks do need an intertubes drivers license? Besides, its your website, your images (unless its CC), and you can do what every $THE_BAD_WORD you want.
Reminds me of this[0] where someone ‘hacked’ their website.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuttle,_Oklahoma

Posted on 20-Jun-07 at 4:25 am | Permalink
Resonate wrote:

Thats just excellent haha

Posted on 23-Jun-07 at 3:43 am | Permalink
Rogue wrote:

That “anonymous” comment just above here seems to be signed appropriately. He ended the message with his signature, asshole.

I host my page on my own server and buy my bandwidth, a costly commodity.

I had a bandwidth thief (alias Busybody which I found after following the referrer info) link to a gif on my page and use it in his macho signature file on an adult/porn forum where he posted dozens of messages with little or no content, just to display his signature. My access.log was filling with hundreds of hits on just this image… time to fight back with htaccess and a change of image.

I first tried an animated gif with the message about bandwidth theft. It made no difference.
Changing to a porn pic didnt work… duh it was an adult/porn forum. Oh well. I decided that I had to get his attention and make it personal.

I created a very bright colored scrolling gif with the message [Busybody is also known as "Beagle F--ker"] and [Busybody sucks and swallows]. It worked. Hmmm (looking up a couple or three posts) hey asshole you seem to be the Busybody type, was that you? You certainly seem to feel free with use of other peoples bandwidth.

Posted on 24-Jun-07 at 9:04 am | Permalink
Jake wrote:

Brilliant, loved your description of the internet as a plane without pilots, it’s incredible to see how we got from point A to B, Academics and computer culture to a sea of fucktards.

Posted on 25-Jul-07 at 9:44 am | Permalink
artem wrote:

I had a bandwidth thief (alias Busybody which I found after following the referrer info) link to a gif on my page and use it in his macho signature file on an adult/porn forum where he posted dozens of messages with little or no content, just to display his signature. My access.log was filling with hundreds of hits on just this image… time to fight back with htaccess and a change of image.

Posted on 23-Aug-07 at 4:42 am | Permalink
laura wrote:

Tell other people browsers to go fetch the image from where you got it from. Yup, that’s how the web *works*. That’s how it was *designed to work* If the owner doesn’t want other people to get the image, there are plenty of ways for them to accomplish this. Just tell your webserver not to serve resources to anyone you don’t want to serve it to. You can do this by restricting by IP address, or HTTP referer [sic], or by User-Agent if you want.

Posted on 23-Aug-07 at 4:49 am | Permalink
tramadol wrote:

I created a very bright colored scrolling gif with the message [Busybody is also known as "Beagle F--ker"] and [Busybody sucks and swallows]. It worked. Hmmm (looking up a couple or three posts) hey asshole you seem to be the Busybody type, was that you? You certainly seem to feel free with use of other peoples bandwidth.

Posted on 24-Sep-07 at 8:45 am | Permalink
tramadol wrote:

I created a very bright colored scrolling gif with the message [Busybody is also known as "Beagle F--ker"] and [Busybody sucks and swallows]. It worked. Hmmm (looking up a couple or three posts) hey asshole you seem to be the Busybody type, was that you? You certainly seem to feel free with use of other peoples bandwidth.

Posted on 24-Sep-07 at 8:46 am | Permalink
Zephram Stark wrote:

The idea of Bandwidth Theft is a construct that negates its own system. Itâ€™s like a Soviet saying, â€œI want to use the Socialist system and benefit from it, except for the part where it wants something from me.â€

The Internet was designed around the concept of â€œhotlinkingâ€ so that the same information wouldnâ€™t have to be repeatedly uploaded. If your information is being accessed hundreds of thousands of times, you have benefited humanity far more than the few pennies it has cost you. From the standpoint of the philosophy upon which the Internet was built, you are a great success, but it apparently doesnâ€™t feel like success to you because you judge it in antiquated monetary terms.

Let me translate it into terms of profit and loss for you:

Every bit of benefit you have ever received from the Internet required the underlying philosophy upon which the system was built. The philosophy is that a structure of exchange built on the human need to benefit society is vastly superior to a monetary economy. From an ethical standpoint, you can choose to be part of that philosophy or you can choose to not be part of it, but no moral standard in the world will let you profit from the same system that you actively attempt to circumvent.

You slam Wikipedia and MySpace as if action needs to be taken to fix the internal organization of these sites, but theyâ€™re the ones embodying the base philosophy of the Internet: they post information any way they want and that information (including all public pictures) is â€œhotlinkedâ€ by the entire world without any consideration as to whether a particular use provided sufficient â€œknowledge.â€

Yours truly,
Zephram Stark
â€œIf I didnâ€™t care, I wouldnâ€™t share.â€

Posted on 19-Dec-07 at 3:00 pm | Permalink
Kit wrote:

Nice nice nice. Truly you are He-Man, Master of the Internets.

And for the “Think about the children!!! The children!!!” critics, please. Scarred for life? Are we on the same internet? ã€€

The internet that has 2Girls1Cup?

Uh huh. Goatse ain’t that bad (how old were we when it first rolled around back in the day?). He was just the best man for the job.

Posted on 21-Jan-08 at 10:00 pm | Permalink
Anonymous wrote:

You Win!

Posted on 13-Feb-08 at 7:09 pm | Permalink
Garrison wrote:

Not sure why this got redditted so recently, but I’m glad that it did. I’d long forgotten about textfiles.com, and now I’m certain it’ll work its way back into my daily routine.

Brilliant.

Posted on 14-Feb-08 at 3:38 am | Permalink
Anonymous wrote:

Wonder if this connects back to “anonymous” hacking some kid’s Myspace, as reported by Fox News.

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNO6G4ApJQY

Posted on 14-Feb-08 at 7:08 am | Permalink
Douglas wrote:

> The Internet was designed around the concept of â€œhotlinkingâ€

Simply put: No, it wasn’t. The web (part of the Internet) was based around linking between HTML files. Hotlinking is embedding a “hot” link to an image on someone else’s web site, and pretending that it is an image on your web site. Different things.

As for Wikipedia, they understand hotlinking, and they *don’t do it*. They go to pains to verify the copyright status of the non-hotlinked images they host. See the licensing section associated with every image on Wikipedia, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kandinsky_white.jpg

Posted on 14-Feb-08 at 8:54 am | Permalink
Lance wrote:

Wow. This is one of the best posts I have read in a long time. I salute you on your swift use of the “mv” spelling. Post more letters if you get them!

Posted on 14-Feb-08 at 10:15 am | Permalink
Typical Web Surfer wrote:

Great article! I fully support this kind of endeavor..the state of people ‘not helping themselves’ is rather sad, but ultimately fine with me if they can’t empower themselves.

When I read a great article or post, especially when it comes from a site like reddit or digg, I try to look for interesting web ads, so as to give back to the author. This is easier and cheaper than Paypal, and while less substantial is still something I wish more people would advocate in these ad-blind days.

In closing, I will bookmark your site and read up from time to time! Cheers.

Posted on 14-Feb-08 at 12:04 pm | Permalink
Ellezeebub wrote:

heh. funny.

but, i didn’t click on the link. seems likely to burn into you soul, and that isn’t one of the things i want popping up in my dreams.

Posted on 15-Feb-08 at 5:59 pm | Permalink
Brian Macker wrote:

I have to side with the other wet blankets that posted here. This was sort of setting up a vending machine that hands out free ice cream and depending on ad revenue or just expecting credit for the good will. Then some smucks come along and build a robot that uses your machine and delivers the free ice cream to a bunch of kids. So your response to this is not to make your machine screen out the robots, but instead you lace your ice cream with rat poison. For some reason you think the fact that other people have vending machines labeled “rat poison” that despense the same somehow makes what you did ethical.

As you’ve already admitted the kids who are receiving the ice cream from these arguably corrupt robots are not savy enough to realize what danger they are in if someone were to poison the food supply.

All the kids did is look for “ice cream” in the local paper and there was an ad saying free ice cream was to be had at the location where the robot was distributing it.

When it all comes down to it. You saw the state of affairs and then knowingly, and intent matters, changed the source files around so the kids would be delivered porn. Actually, something that is arguably much worse than porn.

Posted on 16-Feb-08 at 5:29 am | Permalink
Jason Scott wrote:

Brian! Interesting thoughts.

Please enjoy this free ice cream cone.

Posted on 16-Feb-08 at 6:03 am | Permalink
Brian Macker wrote:

Glad you are morally sharp enough to ken my argument. So what are you going to do about it?

The ethical thing to do at this point would be to stop goatseing (spelling) people, and not repeating the behavior.

Beyond that, issuing an apology would be in order, perhaps done with a new picture. Unfortunately an apology might be interpreted as some sort of admission that you screwed up.

There was a time when I might have screwed up like this, we all make mistakes, and I see how the legal pressure is in the direction of you not issuing apology. So I don’t expect you to do it. You certainly don’t owe me one.

Ethical considerations must take into account our harm to ourselves in addtion to others and I’m not sure if any retributive punishment you open youself up by making an apology would be proportionate to the harm you did. You’ll have to judge that for yourself.

It’s most likely no one is going to come after you if you issue an apology. So I think the door is open, but I’m no lawyer.

One way to make amends to the kids is to pull the copyright off that picture they like so much (if you did copyright it) so that they can copy it to their own hardware and save you the bandwidth.

Oh, and BTW, thanks for the free ice cream, although when I licked to the very center it tasted like ass. At least you warned me up front.

Posted on 16-Feb-08 at 11:02 am | Permalink
Tevia wrote:

Brian, who assdildo’d himself to death and made you king of all that is ethical?

why should Jason give away the copyright to an image just because some useless myspace layouts site wanted to use it without rehosting OR asking permission?

if it were my domain the only thing i would have done different would be to swap in some horrific gore or infection photos.

Posted on 04-Mar-08 at 11:14 pm | Permalink
James wrote:

Can we all remember that “the children” have no business being on MySpace; anyone under 14 is not technically allowed to sign up, and any decent parent wouldn’t let them at 14 without knowing what their teenager is doing online. Having a child suddenly faced with such a disturbing image is your own fault if you’ve raised your child to get online and click on whatever flashes and sign up for whatever crap service looks pretty. As a father of 2 pre-teens that have been on the web since before they could talk and understand it is safe if you act safe and dangerous if you act so, I say anyone who was goatse’d had it coming.

Thank you for the great story and wonderful pilot analogy.

Posted on 05-Mar-08 at 1:43 pm | Permalink
JerzeeDevil wrote:

good on you, personally I wish I had never seen goatse, tubgirl, lemon party or any of that mess. yAAAy the internet!

Posted on 29-Mar-08 at 2:09 pm | Permalink
Wrinkledlion X wrote:

You, sir, are a genius.

Posted on 26-Apr-08 at 11:23 pm | Permalink
JD wrote:

See comment above.

Posted on 27-Apr-08 at 4:53 pm | Permalink
badger wrote:

I don’t know what’s worse, that you did this, or that people are praising you for it. Your image has become so popular it’s hurting bandwidth, so you decide to punish everyone who stumbles across it? As if everyone who viewed a page on which someone else hotlinked your image deserved that? And it’s still eating up your bandwidth.

A simple 2-colour PNG with a small “this image was murdering my bandwidth” message would have done just fine, and solved the bandwidth problem. There was no need to be a gaping asshole about it. Especially when you discovered most of the people linking to it were just using a premade template and had no idea what they were doing or how to fix it.

Posted on 12-May-08 at 9:46 pm | Permalink
Izzy W. wrote:

I usually enjoy your article, Mr. Scott. Strangly enough, I find this amusing, but after looking at it, I realized it really wasn’t the best thing to do. Though hilarious, that doesn’t mean that it was the better thing to do. The internet wasn’t made for people to know everything about hotlinking, HTML, CSS, PHP, or whatever. Ethics aside, the people who were victims of the this weren’t the targets – it was people who just browse through the web. Everyone really. “why should Jason give away the copyright to an image just because some useless myspace layouts site wanted to use it without rehosting OR asking permission?” That’s a ridiculous notion to start with. The people who made the layouts weren’t really effected by this. It was the people using the myspace website. You have to remember that the internet is NOT made for everyone to know about websites or whatever. This reminds me an awful lot of what Wikipedians would do, in effect, taht is (see the ejaculation page and you’ll get a barrel of laughs).

Posted on 12-Jul-08 at 12:37 pm | Permalink
RW wrote:

I laughed when I chased down the goatse image: I’ve seen plenty more of the same guy doing much the same thing. It’s not yoga. He’s just naturally “gifted” that way, afaict. His giant pop bottle act is . . . well, special. Actually, after a very short while it gets tiresome; he’s a one-trick show.

And I seriously doubt that little Cupcake is going to be scarred for life. In fact, little Cupcake may go through life with greater confidence because she/he knows now what the inside of an asshole looks like.

This also brings up the difference between porn and simple nudity. Porn is intended to be sexually exciting. Anyone who thinks that all naked pictures are porn has a seriously disturbed sexual nature.

Finally, thanks to your account, I learned something I didn’t know, but should have: don’t hotlink to images. If you must hotlink, hotlink to the entire page that holds the image you want people to see.

Posted on 23-Jul-08 at 11:15 pm | Permalink
angela wrote:

Jason Scott? You’re THE Jason Scott? Like the Red Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger? (sorry, first thing that popped into my mind when I read your name). Carry on…

Posted on 05-Sep-08 at 1:08 pm | Permalink
magnus wrote:

So it has been a couple of years. I’m wondering if you’re still getting many third party referrers to that image.

Posted on 02-Nov-08 at 8:22 am | Permalink
Jason Scott wrote:

Here you go, Magnus:

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1376

Posted on 12-Dec-08 at 5:27 pm | Permalink
Jay wrote:

Hi,

I don’t really know how i came to be here, i think i checked out delicious for some reason, to an article about “The Cloud” then here. I’m not normally one to “Surf” but whatever…

Anyway, I’ve been reading your posts (and will continue to after this), and this one made me laugh, since people are hot linking images on your site you have the power to conduct social experiments en-mass, this experiment is hilarious, and the resulting requests/threats are even funnier.

A parallel can be drawn by those that drive cars, but do not know what under the bonnet looks like.

Posted on 25-Jan-09 at 5:51 pm | Permalink
chat wrote:

I wonder if your â€œEnter â€˜asciiâ€™ hereâ€ bot protection will thwart the thousands of mouth breathers that came here via Digg..

Posted on 01-Feb-09 at 9:22 am | Permalink
Concerned job seeker wrote:

Hello Jason,
Can I kindly ask to have my name/site be switched to anonymous/none or my comment deleted?
You see, every time my name is googled, the image search has “the image” on the first page. Not good if an employer attached it mentally to the name.
It was a great story, and I learned not to comment with my real name if the entry contain something I don’t want people to see.
I’m comment is #107 by the way.
Thank you.

Posted on 17-Feb-09 at 6:21 am | Permalink
netlog wrote:

Hello Jason,
Can I kindly ask to have my name/site be switched to anonymous/none or my comment deleted?
You see, every time my name is googled, the image search has â€œthe imageâ€ on the first page. Not good if an employer attached it mentally to the name.
It was a great story, and I learned not to comment with my real name if the entry contain something I donâ€™t want people to see.
Iâ€™m comment is #107 by the way.

Posted on 18-Feb-09 at 12:33 am | Permalink
Oyun wrote:

Lovely post. Maybe intelligence has won a battle after all.

Posted on 19-Mar-09 at 5:47 am | Permalink
Kat wrote:

Wow…..Im only reading this now, linked from a friend’s twitter account. Im laughing all the way.

I must be out of touch with even kids just 3 years younger than me (and even some my age) because even if just had the knowledge I had when I was 11 (back in 1993), it would of been easy to determine what happened. Hotfreelayouts ….you get what you pay for.

The lesson: If you are going to offer layouts, even free than hotlink your own shit. LOL

Posted on 23-Apr-09 at 8:43 pm | Permalink
Oyunlar wrote:

A bit of a post script here, surely an IMG tagged hotlink to an image is superior to a hypertext link, at least from the â€œviewersâ€ perspective, in that a single text link in an â€œimageâ€ thread could easily be mistaken for spam advertising, even if the image is â€œon topicâ€, whereas the pictureâ€™s content (and thus relevence) can easily be seen if tagged.
Although, of course, the flipside is the bandwidth issue, etc.

Posted on 01-Jun-09 at 12:04 am | Permalink
CaptHowie wrote:

Absolutely legendary.

Posted on 13-Jun-09 at 3:19 am | Permalink
Snuggles wrote:

Omg….this is hillarious…ive had videos leeched so I feel your pain. I absolutely love this idea and am on the search for a video to temporarily take place of the ones being used. That is if you do not mind me using your idea.

Posted on 12-Aug-09 at 9:15 am | Permalink
kral oyun wrote:

Myspace is not actually open to 10-year-olds, or really anyone under the age of something like 14. If someone younger is lying about their age to use the site, then maybe this will simply teach them a lesson about why there are age limits on things at all…

Posted on 23-Sep-09 at 6:31 am | Permalink
Cory wrote:

You sir, are an American hero. I salute you!

Posted on 13-Oct-09 at 7:53 am | Permalink
mp3 wrote:

Lovely post. Maybe intelligence has won a battle after all.

Posted on 19-Feb-10 at 12:21 am | Permalink
rana wrote:

Well played sir, well played indeed.

Posted on 16-Sep-10 at 10:33 pm | Permalink
sohbet odalari wrote:

I salute you on your swift use of the “mv” spelling. Post more letters if you get them!

Posted on 11-Dec-10 at 5:10 am | Permalink
calandale wrote:

Love the story – but the links for moar phun are dead.

Posted on 18-Apr-11 at 12:15 pm | Permalink
Mark wrote:

Very disappointing story, and the comments praising you are sickening. Good job.

Posted on 19-Jun-11 at 8:23 pm | Permalink

Recent Posts

The Twitterverse

Archives

Freedom, Justice and a Disturbingly Gaping Ass

Post a Comment — Trackbacks are closed

RSS 2.0 feed for these comments

Comments (233) left to “Freedom, Justice and a Disturbingly Gaping Ass”

Post a Comment