Thursday, November 09, 2006

JAP Anonymization Protects Scrapers Privacy

Isn't this nice, the JAP anonymization service is so busy trying to protect people's privacy that they don't give a shit that people will use their technology the assault web servers. Their slogan proclaims "ANONYMITY ISN'T A CRIME" but aiding and abetting an assault on a server could be considered a crime, questionable ethics at a minimum.

I got hit by someone utilizing their bullshit yesterday:

141.76.45.35 [proxy2.anon-online.org.] "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT 4.0)"
141.76.45.34 [proxy1.anon-online.org.] "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT 4.0)"
What these dipshits don't know is the few pages of data they downloaded, before the bot blocker kicked in and stopped the assault, has all been injected with hidden tags using CSS. Humans don't see these tags but the scraper, when stripping the HTML to get my text, will expose these tags to the search engine, and then I'll be able to hunt them down like the dogs they are.

Anonymous doesn't mean anonymous for scrapers anymore because even if you hide where you crawl from if this data shows up on the web it will expose where you live so be careful what you do with that data you sneaky little bastards.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Bot Blocking Obsession for Men

Today I realized that my bot blocking has become such an obsession that I'm almost worse than a cultist running around spreading the word of Bot.

What started as a simple effort to save my own website from virtually daily DoS attacks from Asia turned into a hobby as it was kind of fun looking for the next big thing hiding out there.

Then that turned into a product idea as it evolved and I realized the tools I needed didn't exist which is why I resorted to building them in the first place.

Then my universe turned upside down when I realized how much crap was going on that people weren't even aware of lurking under the cover of stealth on the net, THEN it became an obsession to build a product to restore privacy and control back to the web.

The upside is, obsession is a good quality for people trying to launch a new product but it severely impacts your social skills when your mind can't get off the topic as you're now burning all of your processing power 24/7 dwelling on the topic to come up with new insights and innovations to stopping crawlers on a daily basis.

Some days I wonder if I should call a priest so he can splash me with holy water and watch my head spin and spit green pea soup across the room like Linda Blair, but that's being POSSESSED, and I'm only OBSESSED.

The good news is the embroidery company sent my new Polo shirts and the logo translated to thread very nicely, I'm happy about it so now I have my uniform for Vegas next week ;)

Even better news is the graphics designer is working on the new layout for the bot blocker control panel and it should be HOT with CSS clickable bar charts with hover and shit, I can hardly wait to see them and bolt them into the software this weekend.

The crawler apocalypse is on the horizon, there's a light at the end of the tunnel, thanks to all you people for being patient as I wanted this bot blocker thing to be a real solution, not just rushed out the door, and taking my time has truly paid off in what my bot blocker is capable of doing in the real world.

The best is yet to come, I had polo shirts made, you can tell I'm serious ;)