.htaccess and personal firewalls

images not showing up

[brummie]

Hello :)

I have a question regarding .htaccess which I have been using .htaccess to prevent hotlinking for years. However, recently I am getting complaints about images not being displayed. I also installed a new version of Norton Internet Security which prevented the images being shown in my browser until I lowered the privacy settings on Norton.

Is there anything wrong with my .htaccess code which I have in my images file? :( Or is this a fact of life when dealing with newer versions of personal firewalls?

Any help appreciated :D

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
RewriteEngine on
RewriteOptions inherit
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://.*domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://.*domain.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://64.53.261.255/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://64.53.261.255.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*[Jj][Pp][Ee]*[Gg]$¦.*[Gg][Ii][Ff]$ /index.html [R,L]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[brummie]

I've read a few threads about this and I am wondering why Norton and similar products block images which are protected in this way?

If I can find out why, then maybe I can amend my code. :)

[incywincy]

interesting, when i have NIS running it seems to block some of my dynamically generated links, this worries me.

as far as i'm aware the links aren't dependent on any .htaccess entries though.

[jetboy_70]

Blocking hot-linking wholesale will also prevent your images being displayed in the Google cache, which is worth bearing in mind. Could this be the source of some of the complaints?

Can anyone confirm whether blocking hot-linking would have any effect on the caches creating by some of the bigger ISPs?

[Dreamquick]

One thing NIS does do is that it can erase all referrer information from the user's request, so if you are stopping users from hotlinking your images then they could have problems with this is your don't allow images to be served off a blank referrer.

It's something we've seen on the increase in the past few months, going from one user now & again, through to three or four a day. Lots of personal firewalls do the same thing by default, and there are a few corporate proxies that like to do that stuff too.

- Tony