dizzler.com - blocking with .htaccess

I've been trying to block dizzler.com from streaming my content. Incase you don't know Dizzler.com is a service that scans the internet for media files and serves them to its customers via a flash interface. It thus increases your bandwidth usage incredibly while it reaps the benefits of your content without giving credit. Leeching scum basically.

I've tried all sort of methods but so far i havn't had much luck.

To explain my set up first:

I host a few .mp3 mixes on a subdomain with a seperate ftp user. eg: mixes.mydomain.com/mixes/

I've remapped this subdirectory to mydomain.com/mixes/

So the links dizzler has are mydomain.com/mixes/mix.mp3 rather than mixes.mydoamin.com/mixes/mix.mp3. The access logs for mydomain.com show that dizzler still send the referrer (either as c://program files/dizzler if people use its desktop application.. or as http://www.dizzler.com ... if directly from their website)

What I really want is to be able to block all referrers that contain 'dizzler' so people using the desktop application also can't access the files.

I have taken various attempts in the htaccess file is to be placed into the mydomain.com root, none of which seem to work.

Here are some of them:

## Using mod rewrite:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?dizzler.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.*$ http://www.google.com [R,L]

## ----------------------------------------------------------------

## Using Filematch

<FilesMatch "\.mp3">
order deny,allow
deny from 66.232.150.219
deny from .dizzler.com
deny from .deviator.dizzler.com
</FilesMatch>

## ----------------------------------------------------------------

## Using Limit

<Limit GET>
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from dizzler.com
Deny from deviator.dizzler.com
Deny from 66.232.150.219
</Limit>

## ----------------------------------------------------------------

## Using SetEnvIfNoCase

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://dizzler\.com/" get_out

<FilesMatch ".(gif|jpg|mp3|avi|mpg|png)">
order Deny,Allow
Deny from env=get_out
</FilesMatch>

On their own I can not get any of them to work. Can anyone help me, or should I ask dreamhost support to block that site / ip from accessing any of my domains?

I hope someone can help me.

In reply to:
On their own I can not get any of them to work. Can anyone help me, or should I ask dreamhost support to block that site / ip from accessing any of my domains?

What do you mean by not work? After all you're still going to get hits, its just that if the directives are working the status code should be 403 and the size should be 0.

And its not too difficult to debug the directives, you can use a site like http://rexswain.com/httpview.html if you're not a hacker.

cool openvein.org -//-

By not work I mean that if I browse to the dizzler player and try and play a file that i know is streamed from my site, it still connects and streams it.

I am aware that access logs will still show hits from dizzler.com, but as you say, it will call the 403 rather than the mp3 file.

If I 'deny from all' instead of the referer the dizzler player won't connect to my mp3s (but obviously, so will no one else either). I just can't seem top get the referer bit working

The only two ideas I have are to try the "Forbid Linking" feature in the Panel for the htaccess file, and/or to see if you can write htaccess to block an HTTP_USER_AGENT of Dizzler, if it's so identifying itself.

-Scott

In reply to:
The only two ideas I have are to try the "Forbid Linking" feature in the Panel for the htaccess file, and/or to see if you can write htaccess to block an HTTP_USER_AGENT of Dizzler, if it's so identifying itself.

The dizzler media player gets a list of links from a database the dizzler service populates from search engine queries. So often the hits will not have a dizzler-specific User-Agent header and may not have a Referer header either.

This works for me if the Referer header is set.

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer www\.dizzler\.com bad_referer
<FilesMatch "\.mp3$">
Order Deny,Allow
deny from env=bad_referer
</FilesMatch>

Based on the example hit:

74.36.51.152 - - [21/Mar/2007:05:17:45 -0600] "GET /cb/01 - The Package.mp3 HTTP/1.1" 206 7014851 "http://www.dizzler.com/player/pod.swf?p=KmF8MjMzMDMxs=1" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; IEMB3; IEMB3)"

Tested with the following script:

#!/usr/local/perl

require LWP::UserAgent;

my $uri = 'http://openvein.org/media/music/Anythingbox/Binaural_Repeats_1993-2002/08_-_Radio_Static.mp3';

my @referers = (
  'http://www.dizzler.com/player/pod.swf?p=460112fc226ebs=1',
  'http://openvein.org/',
  'http://discussion.dreamhost.com/'
);
my $rule = '-' x 72 . "\n";
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new(keep_alive=> 1, timeout=> 30);
$ua->requests_redirectable([]); # to set

my ($referer, $response);

foreach $referer (@referers) {
	$response = $ua->head($uri, 'Referer' => $referer);
	print "Referer: $referer\n" . $response->as_string() . $rule;
}

cool openvein.org -//- One-time $50.00 discount on DreamHost plans: Use ATROPOS7Edited by Atropos7 on 03/14/08 11:00 PM (server time).

Thanks for your reply Atropos7.

I have changed my htaccess and now I have this:

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer www\.dizzler\.com bad_referer
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer ".*(dizzler|beemp3|skreemr).*" BlockedReferer
SetEnvIfNoCase REMOTE_ADDR ".*(220.181.38.82|202.108.23.172|66.232.150.219).*" BlockedAddress

# deny any matches from above and send a 403 denied
<FilesMatch "\.mp3$">
order deny,allow
deny from env=bad_referer
deny from env=BlockedReferer
deny from env=BlockedAddress
</FilesMatch>

According to the script it works for said domains.

Many thanks.

I hope some one else finds this useful.

I have a similar issue. I want to block image leeches on Myspace.com specifically, and redirect them to a new, small image of a less desirable nature (in order to put them off doing it again).

How can I change the above code to redirect to a set image?

I added the following lines to my .htaccess file:

# hotlink image requests will be served with images1/hotlink.png
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?domainname\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|JPG)$ http://www.domainname.com/images1/hotlink.png [R,L]

Just make sure that the file type you are serving as replacement does not have the same extension as those in RewriteRule - otherwise you get a loop.

Regards.

My site's domain is www.teamsnafu.org
The domain I want to redirect requests from is www.myspace.com
The image I want to redirect to is www.teamsnafu.org/hotlink.png

I just tried this and it caused, ironically, an epic SNAFU. Every single image everywhere on my site changed to the hotlinking image. Even the background for my punBB forums. Everything, no matter where it was being linked from, showed up at that. It was funny, but not when I intended at all.

Can you change your code to fit my requirements? I don't mean to sound lazy, but I really have no clue about this stuff, and I don't want to balls it up again.

Not sure exactly what you are trying to do - I have no difficulty viewing the images on your homepage.
Could you post the exact lines you have posted/added to your .htaccess file?
Also tell us all the kinds of image files you have on your site - e.g. .jpg, .JPG, .gif etc.

Yeah, I've edited .htaccess back so that it doesn't screw up my site. I have lots of users and it's not good for them.

The lines I added were:

# hotlink image requests will be served with /hotlink.png
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)myspace\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|JPG)$ http://www.teamsnafu.org/hotlink.png [R,L]

My site mainly has .jpg and .gif files - those are the ones I want to stop people from hotlinking from MySpace (but just specifically MySpace - myspace.com).

If I understand what you are trying to do (and I may not) change third line to following:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?teamsnafu\.com/ [NC]

Don't forget question mark before domain name.

(edited) Just realized you are trying to exclude only myspace hotlinks - I will have to leave this to a more knowledgable person.

Edited by tomt on 08/07/08 04:35 PM (server time).

dizzler.com - blocking with .htaccess