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Other types of Internet protection 
Protect your email address from SPAM
Spam by email involves sending identical or nearly identical messages to thousands (or millions) of recipients. Addresses are often harvested from the web by "Bots". In their simplest form, e-mail harvester bots are programs that look at web sites trying to pick out e-mail addresses. If your email address is harvested, and you could end up receiving hundreds of unwanted emails per day (and your address could be used as an alias for sending SPAM)!
There are many ways to protect your email address, and numerous email address protection service providers. Here are some simple methods to keep your address safe.
Never, ever, use the html code that opens email programs (i.e. an email link). It looks like this: <a href="mailto:user@domain.com">E-mail me</a>. The mailto code is what harvester bots look for!
Try using a text email address, with decoy text, e.g. contact@domain.com becomes contact@removedomain.com (note that the decoy word must be after the @ symbol). The user should be instructed to delete the word remove. Don't use brackets (e.g. contact@[remove]domain.com) or anything else that identifies the decoy text; rudimentary language processing may allow spam harvester bots to spot the decoy. The down side to this method is that the user must manually put your email address into their email program.
Try using a graphic to display your email address, e.g. contact@domain.com becomes 
. Again, the down side to this method is that the user must manually put your email address into their email program. I have no idea how true this is, but some sources maintain that the method is not completely safe from newer harvester bots capable of optical character recognition (so consider using text that is not all the same size and of similar font).
It's possible to use javascript to make the mailto code look different. The e-mail address will still appear exactly the same to the user, but the actual code will look different to harvester bots (which do not read javascript - yet!). Similarly, the mailto code can be converted to ASCII text.
Use of a mail forwarding service (such as on our contact page) has two benefits. Firstly, our email address is simply not present on the page (it is held securely on the service provider's server), and form completion requires Image Verification. This is a security test to prevent spamming bots from submitting spam. The down side to this method is that few (if any?) free email forwarding services allow the attachment of images (which is quite important to some artists).
Whatever you do, work on the basis that something is better than nothing, and don't use that mailto link.
Protect your text from being copied
The chances are that you have spent a great deal of time and effort describing you artwork and services. Sadly, some people don't expend any effort, and just copy others work.
Detection of text copyright is very easy (see resources below). Preventing is is more difficult, and the best you can hope to accomplish is warning others that your literature is copyright protected.
Protection against Bandwidth theft
Your images may occasionally be "borrowed" by other web sites. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, especially when the borrower gives due credit to the artist. Some will save images, and upload copies to their web server, however others may "hot link".
Hot linking means that the image on the borrower's web site is obtained directly from your server. In other words, they are using your bandwidth allowance (the amount of data transfer your web host allows per month) to display the image on their site. This is known as bandwidth theft.
So how do you know whether someone is hot linking to your site? The truth is you won't know unless it's a massive problem, which will manifest as a spike in your bandwidth usage. Searching Google will reveal sites that are linking to you, and you should check-out the addresses that are unknown to you. Right click on any suspect image, and select properties. You will now be able to see the URL of the image. If it's your URL, the image is hot linked.
There are a few simple things you can do if you find unauthorised hot linking; re-name the folder containing the image so the hot link no longer works, or replace the image with another that identifies bandwidth theft!
Prevention of bandwidth theft requires the creation or modification of an .htaccess file. Some web hosts will provide easy modification of the .htaccess file, which allows you to specify the domains that can access certain types of file (e.g. you may knowingly permit some sites to hot link to a banner?).
The old adage applies: prevention is better than cure. For most web site owners, bandwidth theft will be an annoyance rather than a problem. Detecting and dealing with it takes time. Find out if your service provider offers hot link protection, and if they do, activate it.
Resources
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Iconico provides a free on-line email cloaker that generates a simple ASCII text cloaked email link and a more complicated javascript cloaked link code. |
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Work SmART Artists uses Email me form for email forwarding. |
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Bravenet is a major supplier of email forwarding services, and other web tools. |
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Copyscape has a tool that allows you to search for on-line plagiarism. Type in a URL and any web pages with similar text are identified. It also provides a number free badges used to identify your web pages as Copyscape protected (i.e. they warn against plagiarism, and notify its delectability). |
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Htaccess Tools provides a tool to test for hot link protection. You just enter the URL of an image to be tested. If you can view that image, you have no hot link protection. This site also provides details how to create a .htaccess file (not recommended for the novice). |
Image Protection (part 1) - simple how to advice.
Image Protection (part 2) - an overview of more technical steps.
Article date: 05 September 2009 ¦ Suggest an amendment
