Flashes of Panic

I’m beginning to reach the point where I’m getting a little sick of seeing a quarter of my daily bandwidth go to images hotlinked from Myspace. It’s not like putting my URL on the images is drawing any new traffic, and Iz’s birthday-present photo is winding up on some pages which have to represent the bottom 10% of the non-pr0n web.

But more than anything else, I’m beginning to just resent Myspace. At the top level, the site is owned by News Corp. (i.e. a stinking rich media conglomerate) which sees it as a vehicle for aggregating and selling the attention of young people.

Which is fine by me; it’s certainly no worse than television in that regard. But when you put it that way, why am I being asked to contribute resources I pay for—even a small fraction of those resources—with no return? Let’s face it, Rupert Murdoch et al have a lot more spare change than I do. It’s high time I cut them off.

It’s pretty easy to redirect all image requests referred from myspace.com to another image, and the methods are well-documented. But which image? I’m not feeling quite as vindictive as the guy who goatse’d Myspace (although that may rank as one of the widest-scale practical jokes I’ve ever heard about.) A few choice lines expressing my point of view would be sufficient. But which ones?

• No taxation without representation?
• It’s your space, but it’s my bandwidth?
• TANSTAAFL?
• Something else? Suggestions welcome.

Now Playing: Somebody That I Used To Know from Figure 8 by Elliott Smith

Technorati Tags: images, myspace, hotlinking