Do you have anything to substantiate this or are you just going to remain ignorant? Hotlinking was creating a massive bandwidth problem, this is a perfectly valid solution - you don't control content on other people's site and should have absolutely no expectation of such.
Do we agree that showing a 14 year old a picture of a man's gaping asshole is bad? If this image had "nearly a hundred thousand viewings" and 17% of MySpace's user base in 2009 was under 18[0], what's the math on that? These were people writing HTML for the first time and had the most basic understanding of it, they didn't know what IP or HTTP was, these were just kids trying to make their computer display a cool picture of a Grim Reaper to them and their friends. They probably didn't even understand the mechanism behind why pasting a link between some triangle brackets (which is already pretty difficult to figure out) into their page made it show the image or that bandwidth came from somewhere. And that's why he did it. They deserved it because they were posers, lesser intellects, that got on his internet after September 1993.
Why call me ignorant? I understand perfectly at the technical level what happened, but words like "hotlinking" and "bandwidth" and "solution" shouldn't come into play here at all. If your logic made you permanently imprint a shock image on thousands of impressionable minds you're not the hero. How much did it even cost to upload a 60kB image half a million times per month in 2007? $10?[1]
>Do we agree that showing a 14 year old a picture of a man's gaping asshole is bad?
This is disingenuous. He didn't show them anything; they went looking and found something they didn't want. As they say, you can't go to shit's house and be surprised when shit is home.
>They probably didn't even understand the mechanism
Which is their problem, regretful as it may be. Or more realistically, it's their parents' problem.
>words like "hotlinking" and "bandwidth" and "solution" shouldn't come into play here at all.
That was the problem that started it, so they're absolutely relevant. Pretending that this doesn't matter is willful ignorance. No one was made to view anything.
Do you have anything to substantiate this or are you just going to remain ignorant? Hotlinking was creating a massive bandwidth problem, this is a perfectly valid solution - you don't control content on other people's site and should have absolutely no expectation of such.