Every once in a while, someone will come along and try to snoop through your web directory. What they’re looking for can often vary, but most times, you don’t want them snooping. After all, if you wanted them to find it, you would have put it on your site for them somewhere or linked to it. I’m going to show you how to stop the snoops. (If you’re wondering about the “retards” thing, keep reading)
What is this “snooping” and how is it done?
The concept is simple. Check out this live example. Suppose you stumble across this image of kittens:
http://unseeable.nfshost.com/kittens/100_0385.jpg
AWWWW. Being a huge softie for kittens (like me), you decide you want to snoop around for more images, so you right click on the image on whatever web site it’s on and choose “Properties” to see the image URL. Then you type or copy that image URL to a new browser window and tab and remove the file name like this:
http://unseeable.nfshost.com/kittens/
Jackpot! That’s a wide open directory of images! Now imagine they’re YOUR images. Now imagine they’re something you don’t want the whole world to see, but just people you give specific URLs to. Get the idea?
No Way! I want to block those snoops!
That’s easy enough. Ultimately, the easiest way to do this is to just put a blank index.php or index.htm page in the directory. If you do that, the snoop gets that default page instead of a listing of images. This has been done an a number of humorous ways over the years, but I found one of the funniest today when I was snooping around on Caveman Conclusion. I wanted to poke through his images and was using his site as a guinea pig for a somewhat related project I’m working on, so I tried viewing http://www.cavemanconclusion.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/. Instead of an index of files, I got this :
No matter what you type in, it tells you that you are a retard. It’s not very P.C., but it’s damned funny.
Even if you do this, it won’t protect you from my image snoop tool, so name your images creatively, or better yet, keep those private images off the web.
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