In the middle of moving house, I received an email from my hosting company saying my account was in violation of their Terms and Conditions.

It took ten days to get connected to the net at my new house, and by then my host had suspended my account and nothing was working.

Fortunately a good friend of mine allowed me to lug my iMac up to his house and use his internet for a day so I could sort out the mess – in short… I was using old versions of Wordpress that had vulnerabilities. A very bad idea as these vulnerabilities were being abused by someone or something which caused my T&C violation.

I had plained to return davinian to its previous state ASAP, but what with all the DIY and sorting out my new house I just haven’t had the time.

Anyway, I’m back and I think everything is sorted. I have sucessfuly moved house, and I’m now living in Dorset, not far from the coast and to be honest, enjoying having my own place again.

I have just spent the last 2 hours sorting through my inbound links to this site trying to cross-reference genuine incoming inks against stupid hot-links.

Bizarrely, the image that every numskull seems to want to hot-link to is this – a montage of some funny monkey portraits (link to my original post).

Good old .htaccess to the rescue is all I can say. Basically I have used RewriteEngine/RewriteCond as describe here: How do I stop hotlinking and bandwidth theft? Which seems to work perfectly.

If you think you are being hot-linked, check your top inbound links first and check for your images on the site linking to you. If the site is a blog or forum, you may need to check previous pages/posts. If you suspect somebody is using your images on their site, then customising your .htaccess is probably the best solution for blocking them.

Note: I don’t use an alternative image, but the temptation to redirect to a rude alternative is very tempting at times – but that would then lower me to the thieving hot-linkers standards, and to be honest, I am above all that!

But even if you have the best security in the world, it wont protect you from your office mates or so called friends who you invite around for a cup of coffee and a chat.

The perils of not password-protecting your computer is just as bad, we can laugh about it, but it can be a lot more dangerous than not running a firewall or not having anti-virus software installed. If you’re laughing at this right now, ask yourself, would you really let the person sitting next to you freely browse the contents of your computer?

Below are 5 simple steps to password protecting your Mac*

1. Open up System Preferences.
2. Click on Accounts and add a password to your profile (if you haven’t already). Write it down if you really must, but try to come up with something simple that you can remember, yet not easily guess-able for the office snoop! Oh, and don’t use your children or pets name as passwords – that’s just stupid!
3. Go back to the System Preference overview (Show all Apple L) and click on Security. Check the tick box for Require password to wake this computer form sleep or screensaver and Disable automatic login.
4. Back to preference overview (Apple L) and select Dashboard & Exposé. Set up one of the Active Screen Corners to Start Screen Saver.
5. Quit System Preference and test the hot corner by moving your mouse to it, you should see the Screen Saver start?. If you move the mouse again or hit any key on the keyboard, you will be prompted for the password you set up in step 2.
   You will also notice that when you next turn off/on you Mac that you will be presented with a User Login widow instead of just logging in. Select your profile and enter your password.

Now, unlike the coffee making couple in The Joy of Tech, you can quickly activate your screen saver before popping to the kitchen for a chat!

*Simple steps where worked out on a Mac running OS 10.4. System Preferences may vary on older version of OS 10.