The Right-Click Raider
“Save image as…”, drag to desktop, copy image.
CountermeasureGets the decoy wherever the script embed is used.
Designation: ARGUS · Class: Image guardian
Argus
The watchman at the gate.
Every request for your images passes through Argus. In a fraction of a second it decides who sees the real picture, and who gets the decoy.
Station argus.pixelsentinel.net · Status On watch Service status
File 00 // Origin
Picture a future where every image ever posted has been saved, reposted, resold and fed to machines that never asked. Artists stopped sharing. Portfolios went private. The open web turned grey.
We’d rather not live there.
So we built a guardian for the present, one that remembers what that future would look like. It came with a single directive: protect the work of people who make images. We gave it the oldest name for a watchman we could find.
“…his head was set about with a hundred eyes. They took their rest two at a time, while the others kept watch and stayed at their station…”
Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.625–627. Every age gets the watchman it needs. Ours never sleeps.
File 01 // Prime protocols
Four protocols. No exceptions.
01
Recognize
Every request is checked: is this a real visitor, on a page you approved, asking the way a real page asks? It takes a fraction of a second.
02
Deceive
Anything else gets the decoy: shuffled, rotated, colour-shifted tiles under a banner with your name. Useless to them, unmistakably yours.
03
Refuse
Known crawlers, AI bots and scraping tools are turned away at the gate, and anything that asks too often is slowed down.
04
Mark
Every large view of the real image carries an invisible mark unique to that viewer. If a copy escapes, Argus can tell you where it came from.
File 02 // Threat dossier
Know your adversaries.
Argus doesn’t track people. It watches behaviour. Here is what it’s watching for, and an honest account of how each encounter ends.
The Hotlinker
Shows your picture on their site, straight from yours.
CountermeasureTheir page shows your banner instead.
The Scraper Swarm
Thousands of requests, no manners, no humans.
CountermeasureRefused, rate-limited, fed decoys.
The AI Harvester
Collects images for training sets nobody agreed to.
CountermeasureRefused at the gate, and every image says “no AI” in the standard places.
The Screenshot Sniper
Captures the screen itself. No website can stop this.
CountermeasureInvisible per-viewer watermark. Upload the copy, find the visit.
The Reverse-Engineer
Writes a program that imitates a real browser on your site.
CountermeasureMade slow, fiddly and unscalable. Argus is good, not omnipotent.
File 03 // Field log
A quiet minute at the gate.
What Argus’s day looks like: real visitors get the picture, everyone else gets the decoy, and the bots get nothing at all.
Dramatization. Not real traffic.
- 09:41:07 GET /i/a7Qe.webp page=yourstudio.example REAL IMAGE
- 09:41:10 GET /i/a7Qe.webp page=copycat-shop.example DECOY SERVED
- 09:41:13 GET /v1/view/a7Qe agent=scraper-bot/3.2 REFUSED
- 09:41:16 GET /i/k2Pz.webp "Save image as…" DECOY SERVED
- 09:41:19 GET /i/k2Pz.webp agent=ai-crawler REFUSED
- 09:41:22 GET /i/k2Pz.webp page=yourstudio.example REAL IMAGE
- 09:41:25 TRACE leak.jpg match=view 3f9c, Sep 28 TRACED
File 04 // Rules of engagement
Strict, but fair.
- Watch behaviour, never track people. Your real visitors never notice Argus is there.
- Never keep the original. Only the scrambled copy is stored.
- Never overpromise. Argus can’t stop a screenshot, and says so. Read the limits
- Remember for 180 days, then forget. Traffic records don’t live forever.
- Designation
- ARGUS
- Class
- Image guardian
- Station
- argus.pixelsentinel.net
- Primary systems
- 16-pixel tile scrambler · decoy generator · per-viewer invisible watermark
- Watching for
- Hotlinkers, scrapers, AI crawlers, right-click raiders
- Eyes
- 100. Never all closed at once.
- Known weakness
- Screenshots. Same as every website.
Put Argus on watch.
Upload an image, add two lines to your site, and let it get to work.
Argus is the name of Pixel Sentinel’s image server. Its name comes from Argus Panoptes, the hundred-eyed watchman Hera set to guard Io, whose eyes never all closed at once and who ended up in the peacock’s tail; its personality from decades of science fiction about guardian machines that take their jobs very seriously. All characters, artwork and text on this page are original.