Life is Beautiful

You must have seen this warning on many sites that you shouldn’t select “remember password” on a shared computer. Do you know exactly why they ask you to do that ?  I would like to talk about one good reason why you should not be doing that.

Lets see how its dangerous in firefox when you select “Remember password” for any site.

When you click on “Remember” in the above image, anybody can see your username and password(in clear text) on your computer. If you want to confirm it , try this in Firefox . Click on tools->options . Select the “Security” tab and then click on “Show Password”
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Yesterday I was looking at the traffic on www.shwetagupta.com and found that lot of people from myspace and other domains are referring to images hosted on my server and hence eating up my bandwidth. I was getting 40% of the requests(for images) from myspace domain. Yes! they have a huge traffic. If one has to use the images then they should download them and host them on their server instead of hotlinking to someone else site. “Hotlinking” or “Bandwidth theft” is direct linking to a web site’s files (images, video, etc.). An example would be using an <img> tag to display an image you found on someone else’s web page so it will appear on your own site, weblog, forum message post, etc. Usually personal sites don’t have that much of bandwidth to allow hotlinking of images. Also I observed that lot of people these days not only copy the content from your site but also the the images (still being served from your server i.e. leeching your bandwidth)

You can do two things to discourage hotlinking of content on your site

I Making changes in .htaccess file

Suppose all your images are in images folders ( mine are in http://www.shwetagupta.com/blog/images) then create .htaccess file in that folder with following content so that request for any image on shwetagupta.com (on any domain other than shwetagupta.com) will cause it to display a substitute image (stolen.jpg) i.e

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