>It seems to be spreading... I've had the same problem with my
>web-host. Pain in the patusk, isnt it.

I can't blame them - at least the 'free' web hosting companies. Nothing is free, they make their money with the pop-up ads, banners, etc. And you avoid them by linking to the images from outside. Many people were abusing their servers, using them as image stores for other sites. So folks would get a site at an ISP or something cheap with a small quota, and store all of their images over at the free server. The free servers were seeing a lot of traffic for images with referer headers from outside, so they cracked down on it.

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