Monday, October 27, 2008

Viewzi's Meta Search Engine Taking Screenshots Without Permission

Here we go again with yet another visual search engine called Viewzi taking a bunch of screen shots without asking for permission from robots.txt.

In this case it's a meta search engine and technically the search engines Viewzi culls from has been given permission to crawl, but Viewzi itself was never given access permission.

Here's the Viewzi user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b4pre) Gecko/2008022910 Viewzi/0.1
They appear to have just replaced the word Firefox with their user agent name Viewzi instead of just adding Viewzi to the agent which is kind of crappy to not even give Firefox attribution for their code being used to make screen shots.

Viewzi currently crawls from the "compute-1.amazonaws.com" range of IPs so if you're already blocking amazonaws.com then you've blocked Viewzi already.

Sorry, but you won't get any Viewzi of my sites until you learn to play nice.

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