Ruminatrix
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Sunday, May 11, 2003
Surveillance 'bots
A remote correspondent (hi dad!) sends a clipping entitled Were Shadowy Figure in a Spooky Government Facility Perusuing My Weblog?. Independent (UK) columnist Chris Gulker described finding searches from a 'bot supposedly at "homeland.fbi.gov/Watchlists/suspect/view.jsp" in his weblog referrer log and wondering what was going on. It turned out to be a "referrer spam" artist trawling for reverse hits. Not being much of a log user, I don't know whether this phenomenon is new or not. Anyone? What advertisers -- other than the usual suspects -- want to target the weblog-writing market anyway?
The article is now in a pay-per view archive so I won't link it. But its author's site has some cool stuff on 'bots (especially music industry ones looking for mp3s and so forth) and logs: "Heh, Web server access logs are the medium I read most often lately... they even have ads and spam in them..."