Sunday, November 18, 2007

Another Taser Death

Or, Another example of Canada's finest at their finest.
Near the end of the clip, one of the officers takes his club and uses the end of it on Dziekanski. Nice one guys.






It seems that the police are particularly jumpy in Vancouver. This taser death is not an isolated event. There is a long history of perceived police brutality in Vancouver, both with the RCMP and the local police force going back to the pepper spraying incidents at APEC to the more recent police shooting on Granville Street at 16th.

So I guess you have to be orderly and speak English while in Canada, because the police have no problem killing you in public.

post-script:
How the hell is Vancouver going to manage the Olympics?
Can you say "Police State"?

Monday, October 22, 2007

LiteFinder/1.0

Host: 74.53.249.34
Agent: Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; LiteFinder/1.0; +http://www.litefinder.net/about.html)

This is a horribly mis-configured spam bot. Best bet: forbid the damn thing from your site

Friday, August 24, 2007

Canada's Finest

This is how the police act in Canada. The three masked men in the video are actually police officers at a recent peaceful protest rally in Montreal Canada. Police officials originally lied about the officers and their roles: "Quebec's provincial force has flatly denied that its officers were involved in the incident." Yet a few days later:"The police admission came after several days of accusations from the protesters and denials from police that the three men were agents trying to provoke a confrontation between protesters and police."-CBC Canada story.
and
"At no time did the officers in question engage in provocation or incite anyone to commit violent acts," Insp. Marcel Savard.
Apparently pushing, shoving and carrying rocks are not violent acts, or an attempt to incite violence.

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Rizler Gets 30 years

Christopher William Smith gets 30 years for his 24 million dollar internet drug pharmacy. His co-workers get lighter sentences for their roles.

Just read the story at StarTribune.com.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Garbage in Vancouver

Hey Sullivan,

Why don't you put down your Olympic toys and do your job?

For example, get back to the table with CUPE Local 15.

Vancouverites
are putting up with enough already, with the snarled traffic, and endless construction projects, never mind another extended garbage strike. So ya know what? F. your garbage plan.

It wouldn't surprise me if that millennial mess on Cambie starts to look like an Olympic size garbage dump.

Thursday, May 31, 2007

TMCrawler

Host: 128.241.20.206
Agent: TMCrawler

This bad-bot visited a site, grabbed the robots.txt twice and started to follow links at a very leisurely pace: just sub-directories over a couple of hours.

Then it started to explore a directory in a systematic fashion. It picked a sub-directory and began a numerical search: /directory/0, then /directory/1, and so on. I caught this bad-bot quickly because I have any 404 errors emailed to me immediately. I suspect it would have tripped a trap soon enough though.

Others have reported this bot as a WTF is this thing doing?

Based on its activites, I have simply decided to deny it access to my sites.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Beware of Telus

The future is not friendly. At least if you have an account with Telus, based in Alberta, Canada.

Telus offers telephone, cell-phone and internet services for individuals and businesses in in Alberta and British Columbia, Canada; and web-hosting for anyone who will sign up with a credit card.

Just try to close your account at the end of your service agreement, however. Telus keeps on charging your credit card, sometimes cancelling your service, sometimes not.

I've had three different accounts with Telus, web-hosting, telephone, and internet, and when I've tried to close them it was the same each time:

each time the service agreement was at an end, I gave them appropriate notice that I would be cancelling service. In each case, Telus either continued to charge my credit card monthly for the canceled and disconnected service, or send me a monthly bill for advance charges for services.

With the web-hosting account, Telus eventually did reverse the charges to my credit card: it took several emails on my part to draw their attention to their extra-billing.

When I canceled my phone service, they disconnected the service right on time. Nevertheless, the billing department didn't get the news: they continued to send me a monthly bill for the service. It took a letter of complaint to get the phone charges reversed.

I canceled my internet over the phone. They said no problem and sent me another bill for the upcoming month. I sent a notice in writing describing the extra billing, and re-affirming my notice of cancellation. They sent me a bill showing the outstanding amount from the previous bill -and new charges for the upcoming month, with a threat to disconnect service if I didn't pay up soon! Egads!


If this extra-billing is happening to me, I would expect that it is happening to many other Telus customers. It is too much of a coincidence that they would continue to bill on a closed account on three separate occasions.

Canceling a phone or internet service should not be this much work. Service agreement ends. Customer calls and cancels service, Company says thank you for your business, rather than continue to bill you.

Telus, your future will go down the tubes. Ask anyone on the street, your customer service is abhorrent and offensive.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Bad-Bot Trap Revisited

There seems to be an increase of late in bad-bot activity with new ips, and new user-agents. So I thought I would add a couple of ideas to flesh out my original A Simple PHP based Bad-Bot Trap that seems to be rather popular.

I'm flattered that people are posting and collecting the links to this blog. But some scum are stealing the articles and posting them on their own sites: you who do so will receive instant and debilitating bad karma as a result. Furthermore, you do not have permission to do so. May you experience endless server and php errors.

Just link, its nicer. If you have comments or suggests, go for it.

I offer the following with the standard disclaimer: If you don't understand the code, don't use it!

We can notice that the bots tend to follow the links on a page in one of three fairly predictable ways: top down, alphabetically ascending, and alphabetically descending. If we wish to trap a bad-bot early on in its travels through our site, we can easily set traps for each possibility using the original bad-bot trap and a little .htaccess magic.

First add the following rules to the robots.txt under User-agent: *

Disallow: /afile.html
Disallow: /zfile.html
Disallow: /nofile.html

add to .htacess

# set 'RewriteEngine On' if you haven't already
# redirect badbots
RewriteRule ^afile.* /badbots.php [L]
RewriteRule ^zfile.* /badbots.php [L]
RewriteRule ^nofile.* /badbots.php [L]


Now we have three different traps to embed in our pages:

<p style="color:white;background:white;height:0;visibility:collapse;"
onclick="return false" >
<a href="/badbots.php" >.</a>

which can go at the top of the page

<p style="color:white;background:white;height:0;visibility:collapse;"
onclick="return false" >
<a href="/afile.html" >.</a>

and

<p style="color:white;background:white;height:0;visibility:collapse;"
onclick="return false" >
<a href="/zfile.html" >.</a>

which can go pretty much anywhere on a page.

The traps should be self-evident as to their use. The Disallow: /nofile.html exclusion was added for that particular species of bad-bot that uses the robots.txt to find links.

Happy Trapping!

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Internet Explorer 7.0 (MSIE 7.0)

So, after spending some time with Internet Explorer 7.0 ( MSIE 7.0), I can't decide if its a move sideways or backwards. From a user's perspective, it certainly is prettier than MSIE 6. Unfortunately it's 'security' features get annoying really fast. Try it and you'll see what I mean.

From a web developer's perspective, its a pain in the butt. Though some of the problems of MSIE 6 have been addressed in 7, a whole new set of problems need to be dealt with: web pages that have hacks to get 6 to behave, have to be re-hacked now to get 7 to behave.

Hey Microsoft: can't you guys figure out how to handle 'float' properly? And javascript, sorry JScript, don't get me started. What the hell's the problem? Mozilla figured this stuff out long ago. Were you not at the table when the standards were developed? My god CSS 2 is almost 10 year old! Its as if you purposely undermine standards that you were involved in establishing, by releasing broken software like MSIE 7, in order to undermine your competition. Truly evil, Microsoft.

Do some bug comparisons between 6 and 7 if you like. A good place to start is http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/

So now we, as developers, have to maintain 3 sets of pages: one for browsers that actually work the way they are supposed to ( or at least try to address their bugs and short-comings in an open and timely manner), one for MSIE 6, and one for MSIE 7.

Egads, I feel dirty every time I have to use something created by Microsoft.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Trapped Bad-Bots

2007-10-22
Host: 74.53.249.34
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; LiteFinder/1.0;
+http://www.litefinder.net/about.html)

2007-10-18
Host: 99.238.107.208
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)

2007-10-08
Host: 213.189.25.182
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET

2007-10-06
Host: 82.99.30.27
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

2007-10-05
Host: 82.99.30.32
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

2007-10-05
Host: 131.107.0.95
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; WOW64; SV1)

2007-10-03
Host: 67.19.250.26
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Gigamega.bot/1.0; +http://www.gigamega.net/bot.html)

2007-10-02
Host: 82.99.30.10
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

2007-09-10
Host:207.46.55.27/30
Agent: MSNPTC/1.0 (stupid ms bot can't parse robots.txt properly)

2007-07-13
Host:218.231.136.5
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows XP; DigExt)

2007-07-10
Host: 38.100.41.112
2007-07-06
Host: 209.85.94.164
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows XP)

Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US;
+http://process4.com) Gecko/20070508 Firefox/1.5.0.12
stupid bot grabbed the robots.txt, then the first link listed in its exclusion list


2007-07-03
Host:74.208.71.84
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET
CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

2007-06-27
Host: 63.251.174.4
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET
CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)


2007-06-26
Host: 24.87.89.186
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET
CLR 1.1.4322)

2007-06-22
Host: 64.92.199.41 and 64.92.199.41 (they have the whole block actually, I'm just banning the agent for a while)
Agent: libwww-perl/5.805

64.92.199.42
Agent: libwww-perl/5.805

2007-06-18
Host: 81.223.254.34
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT)

2007-06-15
Host: 201.5.229.201
Agent: Mozilla/3.0 (compatible; WebCapture 1.0; Auto; Windows)

2007-06-14
Host: 208.99.195.54
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

2007-06-05
Host: 202.179.180.42
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; NaverBot/1.0;
http://help.naver.com/delete_main.asp)

2007--05-26
Host: 24.242.34.213
Agent: MJ12bot/v1.2.0 (http://majestic12.co.uk/bot.php?+)

2007-05-25
Host: 84.88.32.199
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.23[ca]

2007-05-10
Host: 220.181.34.177
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; QihooBot
1.0 qihoobot@qihoo.net)

2007-04-26
Host: 65.222.176.124
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows XP)

2007-04-24
Host: 212.219.190.178
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT)

Host: 207.115.69.215
Agent: Mozilla/4.0/ (compatible- MSIE 6.0- Windows NT 5.1- SV1- .NET CLR 1.1.4322; ; )

Host: 65.222.176.125
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows XP)

Host: 203.162.3.157
Agent: -

Host: 222.254.232.24
Agent: -

Host: 66.199.236.50
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 6.0)

Host: 69.84.207.39
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50215)

Host: 208.223.208.181
Agent: Python-urllib/1.16

Host: 208.53.147.89
Mozilla/3.0 (compatible; NetPositive/2.2)

Host: 70.87.196.242
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10)
Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6


Host: 65.222.176.122
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows XP)


Host: 84.69.146.235
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR
1.1.4322)

Host: 84.70.209.45
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR
1.1.4322)


Host: 38.100.41.105
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows XP)

Host: 38.100.41.102
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows XP)

The related block of ips hosting bad-bots that I've seen so far are in the range 38.100.41.100 - 38.100.41.107

Host: 88.198.7.39
Agent: findfiles.org/0.9 (Robot;robot@findfiles.org)

Host: 72.21.50.202
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; MSNIA; Windows 98)

Host: 65.222.176.123
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows XP)

Host: 88.151.114.39
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Webbot/0.1; http://www.webbot.ru/bot.html)