[coreyja]

I'm gonna test it out on a much smaller scale, and slightly different setup. I just grabbed 3 images from a rarely used server hosted with DigitalOcean, with a custom domain, and put them in a new Google Sheet using the same =image(url) technique the author mentioned. The access logs show Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)" grabbed each of the images once immediately which makes sense. I'll check back in a few hours and see if there are any other requests.

Edit: I also grabbed 3 different images and put them in a separate sheet. I'm gonna leave one open on my desktop and not open the other and see if that changes the requests.

One Hour Later: I think that Google is probably grabbing images On-Demand now. There are 12 total requests on my 6 images. The first 6 are sporadic, which correspond to when I added the images to the sheets. Then the next 3 are in the same second, which come from opening the sheet on my desktop. And the last 3 also came in the same second, again from opening that sheet on my desktop. I kept one open and closed the other and neither have had the images requested since.

[onli]

I'm pretty sure they fixed it. I don't remember whether that was already in the original discussion of this story or a little bit later, but I remember the comment that one can't use it anymore as an attack tool since the feedfetcher behaviour changed.