Curses - Foiled Again!

Curses - foiled again!! 

Hopefully that's what some photo thieves in Brazil are thinking today.  A while back I posted this, about how some kind of freaky communications I received on Flickr by them begging me to let them use some of my photos on their Orkut pages caused me to make my Flickr pages private (I haven't gone back since, although I'm still maintaining my Pro account until I feel comfortable enough to go back and open it all up again).  After I privatized my Flickr account, I began to get some similar comments on my blog.  Of course they had been smart enough to copy my blog address from my Flickr profile before I pulled it...  I know it's not a Ds thing, because from what I can gather from the bogus profile pages of the people who contacted me on Flickr, they just gather pictures of cute little girls.  I suppose I could be flattered, but, uh, thanks but no thanks...

I keep my Feedjit live blog visit feed open on my desktop at work all day so I can see who's coming and going, and I make a quick check of my analytics every morning, just to see what was up with the previous day.  Over the last 8 or 9 months, however, I have seen large numbers of visits from Brazil by way of Orkut.  It dropped off for a while, then in the last week or so I've seen a massive increase in those visits.  And on those visits, I could see that they were clicking on each. and. every. photo. in my blog, systematically.  Likely copying them. 

To say I felt helpless as I watched them is an understatement.  I had no idea what to do to stop them in their tracks as I watched Feedjit continually flaunt their activities.  Finally, on Friday, I couldn't take it any more.  I pulled my blog and made it private.  Just temporarily, until I could figure out what to do.  I remembered that someone had recently sent me instructions on how to change the code in each photo, individually, to make it non-copyable.  Daunting, to say the least, as I couldn't venture to guess how many photos I actually had on my blog.  Not to mention, the thought of actually deleting code scared the pants off of me, but once I got into the swing of things, there was no stopping me!  I managed to make my blog public again on Friday evening, and had finished fixing all of my photos by Saturday morning.  Granted, they've probably already stolen just about all of them already (they had left off at October 2010 when I stopped them on Friday), but I think there are several different entities doing the same thing, from the same source, so I've at least put a stop to any future activity.  No clue what they're doing with the pics.

On Saturday afternoon and again on Sunday, I got several hits from Brazil (different locations, different IP addresses) but instead of sticking around and clicking on photos, they tried a couple of different pages and gave up.

And damn, that felt good!!!

In the meantime, I invite them to go ahead and try to steal one of these...  (insert sound of blowing raspberries)