Talking about the technical aspects: is this really something Paul Graham can do? Wouldn't blocking inbound links be handled on the client side, perhaps via mod

Talking about the technical aspects: is this really something Paul Graham can do? Wouldn't blocking inbound links be handled on the client side, perhaps via mod_rewrite or something along those lines? Come to think of it, isn't scripting.com doing exactly this? Yeah, it's not perfect: it's actually really easy to get around, because all you have to do is copy/paste the link. But the overwhelming majority of the abusers won't even do that much work: they'll assume the link is dead, the nerd-rage will cool off, and they'll go elsewhere, leaving nothing on your site but a line in the server log.