bad nature of hotlink protection

[rooty]

Quite a few of us would agree that hot linking is one of our many things to think about when launching a new site.

the normal anti hot linking code allow your site(s) and empty referrers... and it works brilliantly

BUT (the big butt)

what about
images.google.com
translate.google.com
google cache (http://209.85.??.??/search?q=cache:)
AOL Cache & compression servers
more...

I've collected a few mod_rewrite lines of code to help with google and AOL (cant confirm it works for AOL... perhaps someone can?).

Does any of you have a comprehensive list of these lovely sites we do want to allow to hotlink to your site(s)?

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?aol\.com/.*$      [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?aol\.com$      [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?google(\.co[m]?)?(\.[a-z]{2})/.*$      [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?google(\.co[m]?)?(\.[a-z]{2})$      [NC]
RewriteCond %(HTTP_REFERER) !\/search\?q=cache