Nimrod, an armoured guardian with a single glowing visor

Designation: NIMROD  ·  Class: Image guardian

Nimrod

The hunter at the gate.

Every request for your images passes through Nimrod. In a fraction of a second it decides who sees the real picture, and who gets the decoy.

Station nimrod.pixelsentinel.net  ·  Status On watch

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 hunter we could find.

“…a mighty hunter…”

Genesis 10:9. Every age gets the hunter it needs. Ours hunts scrapers.

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, Nimrod can tell you where it came from.

File 02 // Threat dossier

Know your adversaries.

Nimrod doesn’t hunt people. It hunts behaviour. Here is what it’s watching for, and an honest account of how each encounter ends.

OpportunistNeutralized

The Right-Click Raider

“Save image as…”, drag to desktop, copy image.

CountermeasureGets the decoy. Every time.

FreeloaderNeutralized

The Hotlinker

Shows your picture on their site, straight from yours.

CountermeasureTheir page shows your banner instead.

AutomatedContained

The Scraper Swarm

Thousands of requests, no manners, no humans.

CountermeasureRefused, rate-limited, fed decoys.

AutomatedContained

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.

HumanTracked

The Screenshot Sniper

Captures the screen itself. No website can stop this.

CountermeasureInvisible per-viewer watermark. Upload the copy, find the visit.

DeterminedSlowed

The Reverse-Engineer

Writes a program that imitates a real browser on your site.

CountermeasureMade slow, fiddly and unscalable. Nimrod is good, not omnipotent.

File 03 // Field log

A quiet minute at the gate.

What Nimrod’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.

nimrod.pixelsentinel.net
  1. 09:41:07 GET /i/a7Qe.webp page=yourstudio.example REAL IMAGE
  2. 09:41:10 GET /i/a7Qe.webp page=copycat-shop.example DECOY SERVED
  3. 09:41:13 GET /v1/view/a7Qe agent=scraper-bot/3.2 REFUSED
  4. 09:41:16 GET /i/k2Pz.webp "Save image as…" DECOY SERVED
  5. 09:41:19 GET /i/k2Pz.webp agent=ai-crawler REFUSED
  6. 09:41:22 GET /i/k2Pz.webp page=yourstudio.example REAL IMAGE
  7. 09:41:25 TRACE leak.jpg match=view 3f9c, Sep 28 TRACED

File 04 // Rules of engagement

Strict, but fair.

  • Hunt behaviour, never people. Your real visitors never notice Nimrod is there.
  • Never keep the original. Only the scrambled copy is stored.
  • Never overpromise. Nimrod can’t stop a screenshot, and says so. Read the limits.
  • Remember for 180 days, then forget. Traffic records don’t live forever.
Designation
NIMROD
Class
Image guardian
Station
nimrod.pixelsentinel.net
Primary systems
16-pixel tile scrambler · decoy generator · per-viewer invisible watermark
Quarry
Hotlinkers, scrapers, AI crawlers, right-click raiders
Known weakness
Screenshots. Same as every website.

Put Nimrod on watch.

Upload an image, add two lines to your site, and let it get to work.

Nimrod is the name of Pixel Sentinel’s image server. Its name comes from the mighty hunter of the Book of Genesis; its personality from decades of science fiction about guardian machines that take their jobs very seriously. Any resemblance to giant robots from a certain comic-book universe is a fond, unofficial tip of the hat. All characters, artwork and text on this page are original. Pixel Sentinel is not affiliated with or endorsed by any comic publisher or film studio.