Friday, April 11, 2008

RTGI - The French Social Media Spybot

Yet another social media mining operation designed to track every bit of intel said about brands, people, politics and more.

From a translation of their site:

Our solutions simplify the identification of influential communities and monitoring of their conversations, to the benefit of businesses, communication agencies or research institutes.

RTGI's approach allows the analysis of the links and content generated by the citizens, journalists, consumers or activists, to draw the contours of communities conversations around your issues, brands and products and their real impact on your image online. RTGI have elaborated the linkfluence to give a unit of reliable measurement of the influence of the social web sites.
The highlighting was added to help you see how it facilitates spying on your ass without going to much effort to do so.

Heck, the French government is in their list of clients!
  • Information Service (GIS) government
  • Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Employment Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Employment
  • Picardy Regional Council (RENUPI)
Sheesh, didn't need to translate as they have an English .EU version too.

Oh well, I'm not rewriting it!

Continuing on...

George Orwell obviously didn't anticipate the internet and he was off by a few years, 24 to be exact, but his overall message of Big Brother watching us in 1984 is finally coming true in 2008.

Anyway, back to the details:
"mozilla/5.0 (compatible; RTGI; http://rtgi.fr/)"
The IP's they operate from are:
88.191.50.170 -> sd-8985.dedibox.fr.
91.121.108.180 -> t800.rtgi.eu.
91.121.25.182 -> merlin.rtgi.eu.
91.121.25.184 -> r2d2.rtgi.eu.
91.121.79.160 -> c3po.rtgi.eu.
The old address of 88.191.50.170 doesn't appear to be active since 04/13/2007 so I probably wouldn't worry about that too much unless you just want to block that dedicated hosting range for good measures.
inetnum: 88.191.3.0 - 88.191.248.255
netname: FR-DEDIBOX
descr: Dedibox SAS
descr: Paris, France
route: 88.160.0.0/11
The dedicated host they currently use has this range of IPs:
inetnum: 91.121.0.0 - 91.121.31.255
netname: OVH
descr: OVH SAS
descr: Dedicated Servers
descr: http://www.ovh.com
So there you go, another way to make your site part of the anti-social media by keeping the snoops out.


11 comments:

Anonymous said...

OVH?

Did you just say OVH?

Cue sound of OVH being dumped

Anonymous said...

You could probably safely expand that OVH range to 91.121.0.0/16.

They have active web sites right across that range, all the way up into the 200's.

BTW, within the 0.0-31.0 range my favorite hostname is:
real.men.use.stunnel.and.7el.net (91.121.17.203). Cute.

Anonymous said...

This post reminds me of one of the funniest pieces i read from IncrediBill

http://incredibill.blogspot.com/2007/05/greedy-french-scraping-bastard.html

Anonymous said...

"So there you go, another way to make your site part of the anti-social media"

Indeed. Antisocial is the best description for much of what Incredibull does, and much of what he writes. :P

In this particular case, the conversations being monitored are occurring in places like blog comments. In other words, in public. There's no expectation of privacy, and thus, no breach of privacy. 1984 it ain't.

Bill, get a grip ... and get a life. Sheesh.

IncrediBILL said...

Oh joy, the Anonyasshole has returned.

Does someone with genital herpes reading this blog want to date this fucker so he'll be too busy scratching to bother me?

Seriously, it would be in the best public interest!

Anonymous said...

I'd say that I wasn't going to dignify that content-free, offensive, and self-indulgent blather with a response, except that I suppose I just did. :P

I see, though, with little surprise, that you still don't grasp that multiple individual posters appear as "anonymous", rather than just one, and that you don't have any response to any actual point that I may have made.

IncrediBILL said...

You're probably the only anonymous poster that ever harps on the same bullshit topics over and over.

Don't go away mad, just go away!

Anonymous said...

I have "harped on and on" about exactly one topic: "RTGI - The French Social Media Spybot". Interestingly, it is a topic that you, too have harped on and on about. So if harping on and on about it is bad, then it looks like we have a case here of the pot calling the kettle black.

IncrediBILL said...

Actually what we have here is a nitwit hiding in the shadows of anonymity pestering me.

I should really disable anonymous posting...

Anonymous said...

Disagreeing with you is "pestering" you? All anonymous users should be punished for the behavior of one, even where that behavior is not actually abusive but merely consists of holding and expressing opinions that you don't agree with?

Anonymous said...

The Google Blogger/Blogspot TOS does not say anything of the sort. ;)