I get a lot of hotlink spam to this site, and normally I don’t particularly care. But when Mercado Libre (an online sales forum similar to E-bay) started using the pictures of one of the switches from my CCNA lab for a posting – I decided I’d try my hand as a sales person.

They could have at least resized the image – but here’s a snippet of what the posting looked like (note: since modern browsers cache imagery, you’ll likely have to hold down the shift button and hit refresh when looking at that post):

A few quick rewrite rules to tamper with that HTTP Referrer:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^.*articulo\.mercadolibre\.com\.ec.*$
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png)$ hotlinkers/computer-thermite.jpg [L]

And voila –

I hope I get a commission off the huge volume of sales this generates.