Hacker News Reader

Nowadays even image hosting services (imgur, ...) act like they don't know how to display an image without having to resort to javascript.

I think that is mainly because of content control. Plain hotlinking is technologically simple, but a bad business practice.

Wouldn't checking the HTTP referer server side fix hotlinking issues once and for all without any JavaScript?

The referrer can be gamed, but it's not something you can't solve by combining it with cookies.