The Web Makes for Strange Bedfellows

From time to time I like to go through my server logs and see who's linking to my site. After all, if a site is linking here, it's probably a site I'd want to look at myself.

Or not.

Last year there was the example of a fundamentalist Christian nutcase who accused me of being Michael Newdow (the atheist who sued over "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance), when it's pretty obvious that I'm not the parent of a school-age girl.

This month I found quite a few referrer entries in my logs from a couple of sites that... give me pause. Neither of them was linking to articles on my site; they were just leaching images from my server. So I'm reassured that they don't consider me a "friend". But I'm not sure I like even being associated with them by proxy.

One was a thread on a message board run by and for punks in large U.S. city. (I'm not going to be more specific, because I don't want to promote the site.) The main topic of debate seemed to be whether 9/11 was funny or was it a fraud. Both of which was so absurd, that it's obvious that they're just trying really, really hard to offend somebody... anybody. Pathetic. One of the participants had included an image link to the file on my site showing the infamous Vietnam-War photo by Eddie Adams of a man shooting a prisoner in the head. This was the punk in question's attempt to add more "funny" images to laugh at.

When I find people leaching files from my server like this, I usually rename the file, and substitute something else, as punishment. (If you want to use files from my site, at least copy them to your own site, so I don't have to upload them for all of your freakin visitors.) In its place I gave them something that might actually give these boneheads something to think about, my recent graph showing civilian deaths in the War on Terror.

The other was a little more disturbing. They too were simply leaching one of my image files, this one the logo for Buy Nothing Day. It was a site in Italian, so it wasn't immediately clear just what the site was about. As I scrolled through it, I could see it was a kind of opinionated-news site, but I couldn't tell what its agenda was. But the graphics started giving me an almost... fascist vibe. I ran the main page through Babelfish, and sure enough: it's part of an international network of white racist news sites. And the article using my "Buy Nothing Day" image file... was promoting the idea. {shudder} Babelfish's translation was rather inscrutible, so I couldn't make out exactly what their goal for the day was, but the notion that I'm on the same side as a bunch of racists makes me a little queasy.

For that image, I did the same rename-and-substitute trick. This time I replaced the file they were using with an image that said (in Babelfish-generated Italian) "racist men are like little girls" with a picture of a little girl crying. I would have liked to have said something more clever and politically correct, but given the hazards of mechanised translation, I figured it was best to stick with a simple taunt that they'd understand.