I noticed someone was hot-linking to an image of Bonnie Tyler stored on my Bonnie Tyler tribute website: Total Eclipse of the World, so I thought I'd circumvent this somehow. I don't want my precious bandwidth going to unknown hotlinkers.

The solution was to use lighttpd's virtual host definitions to insert a condition saying that if the HTTP referrer is not my domain, then the user should be redirected somewhere else. Now, referrers can of course be spoofed easily, but this is not the point. I may still want people to be able to share a link to an image, but I don't want someone embedding an <img> tag somewhere that gets a ton of hits... Here's what the configuration looks like:

$HTTP["host"] == "mydomain.com" {
    server.document-root = "/foo/bar"
    server.errorlog = "/foo/bar"
    accesslog.filename = "/foo/bar"
    server.error-handler-404 = "/foo/bar"

    $HTTP["referer"] !~ "^($|https?://(.*\.)?mydomain\.com)" {
        url.redirect = ("^(.*)\.(jpg|gif|png|css|js)" => "http://www.goldenplec.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/rick_astley.jpg")
    }
}

Greg Brick, author of Subterranean Twin Cities, has allegedly lifted contents of his book from Action Squad's website. Has anyone read it? I assume he hasn't had the gall to lift stories verbatim, but I could be wrong.

If the book isn't worth a read, Action Squad certainly is. It comes filled with photos of urban exploration adventures that are 100% awesome.

Aamulehti reports (with pictures, for proof!) that a well-known clothing chain in Finland, Seppälä, is holding a design competition in which a Pedobear shirt was competing for some amount of time. There's not much original journalism available in the Aamulehti article (which lists its source as Iltalehti), so there isn't much to report; however, Seppälä removed the image as word that Pedobear was available spread. According to Aamulehti, the bear was so harmless looking that Seppälä obviously had no reason do doubt whether it was fit to print or not.

If you don't know what (or who) Pedobear is, take a look at Encyclopedia Dramatica's article (totally not safe for work, if you don't know what Encyclopedia Dramatica is), which explains everything. Normally, ED wouldn't be a reputable source, but it appears the English-language Wikipedia has deleted their Pedobear article a few times, so if you crave Wikipedia Pedobear wisdom, it is available in Finnish.

Now, who exactly is running this design competition? If they missed this, who knows what other 'borrowed' designs they're missing...

A friend of mine recently posted to his blog about a Star Tribune article on the relationship drama of a candidate for city council, Charles Carlson. The original Strib article also pointed fingers at a possible campaign violation, which I think are really more interesting. John also started some public discussion of Quorum-gate; which I don't want to reproduce here out of laziness, but I did make some points there worth reading.

Anyway, someone commented anonymously saying that it "seems irresponsible to make that accusation without any proof" and on a whim I asked John if he could give me the IP address for the anonymous poster. Sometimes interesting things turn up with these sorts of things, and lo', something interesting did in fact turn up.

The IP address (whois) was registered to "Boca Raton Residence Inn", and according to some logs that John graciously donated, this person stumbled upon his blog entry googling for the words "charles carlson jason matheson" (1). Who in Florida would be checking up on that so soon after the news broke?

(1)

12.42.0.8 - - [25/Feb/2009:06:48:51 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 44182 "http://www.google.com/search?q=charles+carlson+jason+matheson&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011912 Firefox/3.0.6"

The logs continued to tell a tale of how this user used John's email contact form to send him an email (2), and then proceeded to post a comment on the fated blog post.

(2)

12.42.0.8 - - [25/Feb/2009:06:53:06 -0800] "POST /contact HTTP/1.1" 200 126 "http://blog.johnschrom.com/contact" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011912 Firefox/3.0.6"

12.42.0.8 - - [25/Feb/2009:06:58:13 -0800] "POST /wp-comments-post.php HTTP/1.1" 302 - "http://blog.johnschrom.com/archives/1362" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011912 Firefox/3.0.6"

As it would have it, Charles Carlson sent John an email via John's contact form that morning, criticizing John for posting allegedly baseless accusations. Content of the form email aside, the case for what happened here is clear, and unless Charles had a travel companion who immediately posted a comment 5 minutes later from the same computer and browser session, Charles is the anonymous commenter.

If someone emailing John from a contact form (it gives you the option to specify any reply-to address) and then posting a comment isn't enough evidence for you, it seems to be widely known that Charles missed a political forum this weekend in lieu of officiating a tennis match in Florida. His recent tweets about Florida sun and a dinner in Fort Lauderdale certainly tie in with this.

There are services for anonymizing your internet traffic however, and a simple Google search will turn those up.

Update: Charles has since dropped out of the race for city council; but this anonymous comment snafu just shows the quality of his character and why it's good he's not running anymore. I hope the tennis officialdom works out for him and is a better fit to his skills.