The myspace.com plague

http://attrition.org/news/content/05-12-31.001.html

A while back, we used to run an image gallery with over 5,000 pictures of all types. During this time, more and more web sites would inline link to the images. Inline linking means the image would display on their page, as if it was their own or hosted on their own server. This caused the image to display fine, but be served up by our server and use our bandwidth. Early on, gallery traffic was responsible for a couple gigs of traffic, but quickly grew. After a couple months, this got to be quite a burden to this server and our hosting situation. On a normal day, we would push out over 10 gigs of traffic from the gallery alone, often enough to saturate the link during peak hours. [..] In the past 48 hours (29th/30th), there have been just under 20,000 link attempts from 928 profiles! If you would like to cause yourself physical discomfort, feel free to wade through a list of the profiles that have partaken in the abuse. I warn you, many of these are physically nauseating and make grown men cry due to the "terrible grammar, horrible page formatting, and annoying graphics" as Rick Forno once said. When you hear people talk of online communities such as myspace.com, remember that they are not some fabulous social network advancing our culture. They are the scum of the internet, dragging it further down the sewers day by day. They are full of the most shallow, vapid and weak minded people our society has to offer. They are the next generation, and that scares me.