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.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bill Atchison of crawlwall, I presume? :)

Anonymous said...

Speaking of which - how long till CrawlWall will be available for purchase, and how much is it likely to cost?

BTW, your captcha image refused to appear in Firefox despite several attempts, so I had to switch to IE [urk]

IncrediBILL said...

I use Firefox, not sure why blogger didn't work for you.

Pricing is up in the air at this time, feeling out the market.

Anonymous said...

Hiya Bill!

Firefox has never shown the captcha image for me, ever since I have been visiting your blog. Not sure how long that is - maybe 6 months? I'm sure your careful records/logs would tell you exactly though :)

I am still using FF 1.0.7 version (not got around to updating yet), so maybe that is a factor.

If you need a beta tester with 15 odd sites (mostly small and parochial),located in the Antipodes - count me in.

Unless your pricing ends up being prohibitive for small operators/resellers, I'll be an early customer.

I'm a fan of your project all the way.

Anonymous said...

I finally found out why the captcha image was not displaying for me in Firefox - apparently it is a known issue with Blogger when cookies are disabled.

Thought I'd let you know in case someone else has the same problem.