Presumably they are paying for the servers/bandwidth to support that, and that money is coming from donors.

It's a waste of donors money if someone is using this image as some kind of "is this thing on" test using hacked computers...

It's both a waste of donor money and a starvation of resources for people actually consulting images on wikimedia commons.

Any for-profit entity hotlinking Commons is unfair. Heck, they have the right to redistribute freely the image as they see fit, instead of consuming resources that are a common good.

But this goes beyond that - it's some blind check of internet connectivity for the app, and doesn't get shown to the user. We're pretty sure of that, given that with the amount of noise that task generated, if there was an app featuring that image at least one of the ~ 90M daily "views" would've been someone reading these posts.

Now, given we want to be nice, we didn't just blindly block the traffic, although making requests without user-agent is against our UA policy https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User-Agent_policy