Thanks, eBay

No, seriously, I’m not being sarcastic for once. I was browsing through the server logs and noticed a sudden increase in hits on the picture of my iBook, with referers pointing back to an eBay auction. Great, another image leecher.

However, a few hours later in the log, the hits suddenly stopped. The referer of the final one looked slightly different, and looking up its IP address revealed that it was from within eBay itself. I tried to visit the eBay URL in the referers, but was informed that the item had been removed from auction.

A few hours later I started getting more hits from a different auction. Since I caught it sooner this time, I was able to visit eBay and catch the auction in action, and it was indeed largely composed of images taken from other sites (one from mine and a lot from a laptop review site). My anti-leeching protection was making my image show up as a ‘broken image’ icon at least, but it was lunchtime and I was feeling mischevous, so I started working on a script and rules to redirect leeching attempts to a random image instead. Nothing offensive, but pictures that would be confusing out of context.

Except before I could apply it, eBay apparently yanked this auction as well. Apparently they take image leeching quite seriously already…