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You've probably already read about the scumware script that we installed yesterday (which is working wonderfully) but we also installed something else you should know about.
This site uses a lot of bandwidth, and that's now the main cost associated with keeping the site up and running. In order to lower the bandwidth used, we've started lowering the size of some of our graphics, but mainly we've restricted certain graphics so they can only be loaded from this site. Basically the routine checks to see if you are on this server, and if so it loads the graphic; if you're not, it loads a graphic that says "Stop Stealing Our Bandwith."
Unfortunately some of our users run firewall software which prevents the CGI variable we detect from being transmitted to the server, resulting in the "Bandwidth" graphic being displayed here as well. We're going to look into a way to fix this, but we might be unable to. We appologize to our users who experience this, but we had to make this change. If you're on our site and notice these graphics, please email us so we can work with you to correct the problem.
After changing the graphics directory and looking at the logs today, it became apparent how large the problem has become. On Thursday we had 2 requests for graphics which failed to load; on Friday it was 2050 requests. That means 2050 requests came from other servers which are leeching off our bandwidth and costing us money. We don't mind spending money to keep the site running, but we want our users to benefit, not someone else's.
Problems, questions, comments? Drop us a line.
  
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