Adultwire: you are indeed correct.. those warez guys are busy networking and trading nasty proggies that drain our resources while we freehosts all sit in our ivory towers trying to fight them independently coz we don't want the competition to get ahead..
There's lots of things that can be done (although a lot of these can be undone by the little warez geeks!) including..
image compression
image validation (watch for those 8x8 gifs that pretend to be 3k but are really 80k!)
image alteration
image conversion
replacing with dialers or other proggy
blocking ips/isps/countries where warez ppl seeem to thrive
logging and tracing them while they are 'in action' and calling the local authorities to nab them (we just did that yesterday to a student in canada ;)
etc etc..
anthrax letters are particularly effective these days..
Gotta keep on your toes to catch these fuckers!
Just when you thought you'd solved it they come right back with some sneaky new way around your carefully crafted filters..
Of course you could just buy so much bandwidth and huge mega servers that can handle anything you throw at them then ya don't have to worry too much about a few measly little copies of XP or whatever..
