Md5 is a very easy way to encrypt any stirng data. Following example take and encrypts a string. Remember that you could not dencrypt any data after encryption.
Hotlinking is when another website links directly to one or more of your images or multimedia files and includes it on their web page. Not only is this theft of your intellectual property, but further more, you are paying for the bandwidth used by that site. Which can result in a problem with your budget.
The most common way to prevent others from hotlinking your content is Apache's mod_rewrite. While this a solution that free available to use, there are a couple drawbacks. One being, that Apache has to be configured to use mod_rewrite (--enable-rewrite). Another one being, that for a lot of people writing regular expressions is not the most easiest thing to do.
Of course there are commercial solutions to the problem. Probably the most common one is cPanel. An administration interface for webserver, which let's you create all the necessary items for your hotlink protection with a matter of clicks, in a matter of seconds.
Problems with common Hotlink Protection
The regular expression, as a pattern, can match all kinds of text strings helping your application validate, compare, compute, decide etc. It can do simple or very complex string manipulations. The list of possibilities is enormous when it comes to what you can achieve using regular expressions. You can take any phrase that starts with an "A" or any character and do various things with it. You can match phone numbers, email addresses, url's, credit card numbers, social security numbers, zip codes, states, cities.....(the list never ends). A huge script that is supposed to validate a user input and prepare it for sql can be reduced to only one line with the help of preg_replace.
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