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.