It would seem like you could prevent hotlinking by adding 1-5 minutes of latency to every request to a list.
Almost no dev would hotlink an asset that took that much longer to display, at least in critical/common paths. It would force consumers (devs/businesses) of the lists to provide a caching/mirroring solution of some kind for their users.
But on the bankend, the request would be designed just for updating the list cache. Handling 1-5 extra minutes per request, on a request that runs less than a few dozen times a day, to update the mirror/cache is trivial.
The issue with this approach is it's too late. It might work if you designed it from the start, but adding it now would only destroy your poor balancer with all the connections they have to maintain (waiting for the 5 minutes to expire).
It was mentioned in this article that they are now serving up accessed denied, but the problem is one of just too many requests.
At this point, it's likely easier to just kill the domain all together and get a new one.
This is certainly not a cure to the problem Easylist has right now. This is prevention. About how to design publicly consumable resources to naturally discourage hotlinking, before it is a problem.
Almost no dev would hotlink an asset that took that much longer to display, at least in critical/common paths. It would force consumers (devs/businesses) of the lists to provide a caching/mirroring solution of some kind for their users.
But on the bankend, the request would be designed just for updating the list cache. Handling 1-5 extra minutes per request, on a request that runs less than a few dozen times a day, to update the mirror/cache is trivial.