Serving a text link to a hotlinked image? - text

I am trying to create some sort of hotlink protection system. I want to use my hotlinked images as an advertising means. Initially i thought printing the URI of the specific image on it, but because the length of this varies, printing it correctly appears to need too much effort. I am now looking into the possibility of printing the image and below it a text link, or just the text link.
I think i had seen this before, but i'm not sure how to do it. I searched around but couldn't find any help. Can someone help me out or point to a tutorial or something, to display text on hotlinked images?
Thanks!

You may be better off creating a watermark on the image if you want to protect your images. The problem though with watermarks is that they detract from the view's experience, especially when they are obtrusive.
If you want to intercept requests to your website directly to your image you can add hotlink protection.
If your host has cPanel here is a tutorial on how to setup Hotlink Protection on your website using cPanel.
But it sounds like you want to 'roll your own' with custom text over your hotlinked image. To do that you'll need to intercept the image requests. How you do that will depend on if your host is Windows or Linux based. With Linux based you can use your .htaccess file to redirect image requests to a script of your choosing. In Windows, I'm not sure how to do it (perhaps someone else can elaborate?).
Here is a tutorial on using htaccess to stop hotlinking.
In the above tutorial it shows you how to redirect requests to your images to a static link, but in your case you can redirect them to a script or a different hidden directory (e.g. /image.jpg would return /hotlinked/imageWithText.jpg), that would have text overlay.
If you need the text to by dynamic then you can redirect the request to your favorite web server script like Perl, PHP, etc. that will then load the image and add the text overlay.
Take care.

Related

Block Search Engines and Every Thing Else

I'm using a program called ShareX which will upload screenshots I take to my web dir via ftp example: https://website.com/screenshots/
I need a way to block search engines and everyone else from browsing the screenshots dir and showing up in google images etc but have direct links work fine when I upload a screenshot to share with someone. (https://website.com/screenshots/screenshot01.jpg)
I don't upload anything super sensitive but would like the piece of mind that its off limits to everyone who doesn't know the direct path to an actual image.
Thanks for any help with this.
Disable directory indexes (assuming you're running Apache)
# .htaccess file in your screenshots/ directory
Options -Indexes
Use a robots.txt. Every reputable search engine will obey it.
Use a CAPTCHA (a little extreme in my opinion).

Load locally stored images through css with inspect element

I'm trying to redesign a small portion of vastly huge site and I was told that I can load custom images to Inspect Element (Chrome) if they are located in the same path as the stylesheet to which the site is remapped. (all done through css via 'content: url('...');') but the webpage is still looking for them in its own resources. So is there a way to use a locally stored image with Inspect Element?
When you're passing images in locally you can use, for example:
file:///C:/Users/[username]/Desktop/picture.png
So if I was to change a background image I would use
background-image:url("file:///C:/Users/Julia/Desktop/background.png");
But note that a lot of sites don't allow you to load local resources, so an error may appear in the inspect console when you try.
Actually, it only works with background instead of background-image (not sure if it works) but background without image seems to work. So put in:
file:///Users/[YourName]/Documents/picture.png
Like this:
background:url("file:///Users/[YourName]/Documents/picture.png")
I just decided to contribute because I just wanted to try it out myself as well and found this as the first answer despite the post being 2-3 yrs old; although for other users it might be helpful.
Also, this was done on Opera, but haven't tried it on other browsers, but it does work for me. Don't include the drive name. But you can simply copy the URL, by dragging the image into the browser (if it loads it) and copy the link. It should work (usually older browsers that don't auto-download the image).

Need ideas on how to protect .exe file from direct download on other sites

We have our application stored on our server, it is an .exe file. The download page is only accessible from our site - using cookie authentication in PHP. I know there are better methods but there is a long story behind this...so I'm moving on. The issue is that the actual url of the .exe has been leaked and is appearing on other websites. What is the best method to protect a link to a file, not the page itself. That is where I'm having issues. I can make it difficult to get to the download page (with the link) but don't know where to begin to make sure the link is only accessible from our site... Is .htaccess (preventing hotlinking) the best way to go?
Yes, .htaccess is probably best. Find any online post about protecting images from hotlinking, the first in my google search looks like a nice and easy auto-generator you can use. Just change the image extensions to exe, or keep them if you want them protected too.

How do I check an entire website to see if any page in it links to a particular URL?

We have been hounded by an issue in our websites because web protection facility pages like ones from Norton keep on telling certain visitors in certain browsers that our websites are potential risks because we link to a certain http://something.abnormal.com/ (sample URL only).
I've been trying to scour the site page by page, to no avail.
My question, do you know any site that would be able to "crawl" into our website's pages and then check if any text, image, whatever in them links to the abnormal URL that keeps on bugging.
Thanks so much! :)
What you want is a 'spider' application. I use the spider in 'Burp Suite' but there are a range of free, cheap and expensive ones.
The good thing about Burp is you can get it to spider the entire site and then look at every page for whatever you want, whether it be something to match a regex or dynamic content etc.
If your websites consist of a small amount of static content pages, I would use wget to download all pages (ignoring images)
wget -r -np -R gif,jpg,png http://www.example.com
and then use a text search for the suspicious url on the result. If your websites are more complex, httrack might be easier to configure for a text-only download.

Browser redirect tool?

I need to create a tool that sits in Windows in the background and everytime a certain web page is entered, e.g. www.google.com, the tool should automatically redirect to another site.
(Not intended to be a virus, I promise. There is actually a genuine need for this for a client.)
Is this feasible? I know there are lots of viruses/spyware that do this so it should be quite simple to implement?
Modify the hosts file.

Resources