Haaahhhk pthooie!

LGF: You're in trouble, program. Why don't you make it easy on yourself. Who's your user?
BOT: Forget it, mister high-and-mighty Master Control! You're not going to make me talk!
LGF: Suit yourself.

I am confused as to what exactly is going on here.

Super! Great! Wonderful! Bravo!

Now, please tell me what the h-e-double hockey sticks this means and why I'm supposed to care? Color me clueless on this one.

Did you send a complaint to the University of Iowa about #2?

HAVE BEEN DETECTED
10010100
IF DETECTED THEN FLEE
IF NOT FLEE THEN RETRY
IF RETRY USELESS THEN SHRUG SHOULDERS
111001
AND GO
IF GO THEN WEEP
BOOHOO

Something tells me that the "Rogers.Webtv" inquiry was triggered through my presence here and they've seen the LGF website so many times on my log that someone scanning the Rogers users has decided to check you out. There may be other people here from Canada who use Rogers as a server too for their computers. It's definitely a Canadian-only server.

HaaaccckKK! PHats!hooey!!!

That's awesome, hehehehe. Thanks for publishing it Charles, now I can add them to all my .htaccess files :)

GOTCHA!
Good for you!

#5 Crill

Did you send a complaint to the University of Iowa about #2?

My guess is that Weeg will (weegle) out and play ignorant on this.

I have no idea that LGF is doing, but if it means even one less piece of crap in anyone's email offering to shrink their mortgage, enlarge their penis, or expand the amount of ink their printer uses, I am all for it.

Re Bot#8 -

They mean to win at Wimbledon.

Grave awaits you, you monkey's mustache!! Hahahhaha!

It doesn't hurt to transform all their ancestors into sloths for ten generations or so, either.

If you're running a mail server with procmail on the same machine, it might also make sense to add each offending IP to a rule in your procmailrc, flagging messages containing ^Received:.*some.offending.bot.IP .

Nice work!

But I was only doing what Doctor Morbius ordered me to do!

Would be cool if that bot warning page was actually full of bogus, randomly generated email addresses.

If they want addresses, give 'em addresses!

Err, clicking that link because of this story won't get me banned, right? :)

Duh, but what if the bot reads your robots.txt and then searches everywhere else in your site except the hole?

Also I suspect that a little bit of eval(unescape(##..##))
will provide the bot with plain-text email messages.

Just thinking aloud here but why not place the email address of each of those here who provide their address into a database accessible by a seperate php processing page.

That is, if I click on an href then I am processed by something like get_email.php?mailto=12345 where 12345 is the index to the email address of the guy who posted the blog.

Then your get_email.php page reads the correct email off your database and gives me the mailto:joe@msn.com or whatever.

That assumes you have db capabilities and php programming which I believe you do...

Perhaps we need a bold-face warning next to the email field in your comment form warning of the dire consequences of public display of information.

Better still, drop the email text box entirely from the Add-A-Comment form.

After all, do we really need to email each other this way?

JohnAshcroft@usdoj.gov

i think the new pentiums should come with a little spout that spews out moldy pigshit on these types of folks... now thats a goood idea!

tech reader wrote:

Duh, but what if the bot reads your robots.txt and then searches everywhere else in your site except the hole?

That's not the point; the trap is to catch the bad bots that either ignore robots.txt or worse, use it as a guide to find hidden pages. Although I guess I'm emphasizing the spambot angle, there are other types of bots that violate robots.txt as well, like site downloaders, and invasive spyware such as nameprotect.com and turnitin.com that drain our bandwidth for their own purposes.

I've considered a DB scheme for hiding email addresses, but it would require implementing full user registration here to do it right.

Charles,

Have a look at caspam.org. They propose a way to encrypt email addresses to defeat spambots.

Having my email address replaced by

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE='JavaScript'>
function Decode() { d("<7ufEHGg@i]zssA9p");}var DECRYPT = false;var ClearMessage="";function d(msg){ClearMessage += codeIt(msg);}
var key = "AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXx YyZz1029384756<>#].";
function codeIt (_message) {var wTG;var mcH = key.length / 2;
var _newString = "";var dv;for (var x = 0; x < _message.length; x++) {wTG = key.indexOf(_message.charAt(x));
if (wTG > mcH) {dv = wTG - mcH;_newString += key.charAt(33 - dv);} else {if (key.indexOf(_message.charAt(x)) < 0)
{_newString += _message.charAt(x);} else {dv = mcH - wTG;
_newString += key.charAt(33 + dv);}}}return (_newString);}Decode();document.write(ClearMessage );</SCRIPT>

would defeat any bot.

i'm all lost in this thread, not a clue what its all about. but very pleased to see Charles kicking some butt.

anyone else doing some butt kicking i can cheer for?

Charles - I haven't looked for the spambot (mainly because of your threats to ban people, so I don't want to touch that one, plus I've been busy w/ tax season & all that), but can this feature be duplicated for Blogger? Believe me, I'm interested in a solution.

Actually, I can vouch for the first computer on that list. It is definitely not a spambot; since it's, err, me.

I used a different computer to access the bots page, to avoid being automatically banned. So that's why I can still read (I generally don't post).

What. no farting on the evil robots beard? How about a little ground shaking? At least give them a bad day! Have we learned nothing?

Dateline: Tokyo - Evil robots, unable to enter the website Little Green Footballs, have decided instead to stalk slowly across Japan, destroying buildings as if they were large cardboard models.

"Curse LGF and the unintended consequences of its robot trap! Now they no longer surf the web in the comfort of their own giant homes, but instead walk slowly and menacingly through our streets!" cried thousands of citizens fleeing the mechanical terrors.

The robots have released a statement, "Your pitiful weapons are useless against us. Send us the one you call 'Charles'. Also, you must supply us with uranium-enriched Spam meat product. And please tell France to quit calling us to surrender; we do not desire their land, cheeses, or virgins, and they are tying up our communication lines."

;)

23 justdanny 3/10/2003 01:08PM PST

i'm all lost in this thread, not a clue what its all about. but very pleased to see Charles kicking some butt.

anyone else doing some butt kicking i can cheer for?

Scrappleface has opened up a comment page dedicated to messages of encouragement for our troops.

If you're feeling ambitious you might want to tar-pit the evil bots. Include a bunch of links off your trap page - that go to dynamic pages that respond v e r y v e r y s l o w l y. Maybe even sprinkle in a few E-mail addresses for the bot to harvest - I'm sure Mr. Arafish would be real interested in making a fortune helping out a relative of the former leader of Nigeria.

Caton - Thanks for the code snippet, I'll give it a whirl on Blogger.

#30 Raj Against The Machine

I got it from the caspamsite. They have a form to encode your email address.

A Jackson wrote:

If you're feeling ambitious you might want to tar-pit the evil bots. Include a bunch of links off your trap page - that go to dynamic pages that respond v e r y v e r y s l o w l y. Maybe even sprinkle in a few E-mail addresses for the bot to harvest - I'm sure Mr. Arafish would be real interested in making a fortune helping out a relative of the former leader of Nigeria.

The dead-end page where bad bots end up includes a nice little 12-second delay. The page I linked above is not the actual dead end; it's just an example that doesn't include the delay.

I don't know if I want to start serving fake email addresses though (the wpoison approach); that will just keep them coming back and we're already consuming mucho bandwidth.

Does anyone know where I can find some PHP source code that will generate Javascript-encrypted email addresses like Caton's example above?

#33 Charles

safemailto.zip

#33 Charles

trolltrapper1.zip is the one that encodes them, but it's a commercial product. The PHP source in the previous comment just changes

mailto:you@yoursite.com

to

/mailto.php?you:yoursite.com

Today, this is enough to screw most bots.

Hmm. That's a nice low-tech, low-overhead idea. I like it.

#36 Charles

I like everything that screws the spammers...

Thanks for the tip. I've written a similar program for LGF to protect our email addresses, and it appears to be working very nicely. Take that, spambots.

Which of these are effective for those of us stuck on Blogger?

#39 Drumwaster

If you want to protect your own email, I suggest the encoding -- go on caspam site, encode your email, and replace each and every 'mailto:' with the script.

If you want to protect the commentors email, I think on Blogger you're stuck with the safemailto method.

The 2nd to the last IP in from Nigeria. OOh! I wonder what they do with those! I hear they have a lot rich ambassadors looking for help cashing out large sums of money! The last one is from Hong Kong (no big surprise there)

To get the location, i use an awesome IP locator tool I ran across this site last week - and have found it extremely helpful:

[Link: www.networldmap.com...]

If you type in one of those non-DNS-named IPs it will tell you (about 90% of the time) the exact geographical location of that IP.

I use it to trace-back origination of [Link: www...] FTP access when I'm concerned about who's behind a file transfer

enjoy

eni

#28 Ernie G

thank you sir.

once again, i dont really understand what all this stuff means, but i'm way digging the 'war room' feeling here of the good guys fighting off the bad guys.

i've got one sweet .223 and one fast 45, if the s#$t gets deep, give me a yell . . .

I don't understand the tech stuff either, but I learned
about tracing IP addresses back from the
"Stop the Hate" tutorial at [Link: www.factsofisrael.com...]
It's under "free stuff" in the left hand column.
I'd give you the direct link, but you really should
see his Macromedia Flash banner on "peace" in
Iraq, at the top of the home page.

There's a superb thread here about blocking robots from your site using a simple .htaccess file:

[Link: www.webmasterworld.com...]

Or try this PHP-based approach instead:

[Link: www.webmasterworld.com...]

Some people's sites are being hit literally thousands of times by unwanted robots downloading everything in site. Why pay for extra bandwidth to allow for them?

#41 - be careful with that - Asparagirl uses it, and they thought I was in florida - until I manually put my class C's in as in nyc, florida, and india ;)

It gets who owns them, not who controls them, at least until someone manually updates an entry for a particular network.

Is it not possible that search engine spiders will also be caught in this scheme? I assume you want to be indexed by Google, Altavista, etc.

Legitimate search engine spiders that honor the robots.txt protocol are not caught in the trap. Only bots that violate robots.txt are trapped. The technique I'm using is similar to the one described here:

[Link: www.kloth.net...]

By the way, on our robot pillory page I added a link to Geobytes to do a location lookup. It isn't 100% accurate, but I'm sure the ID of the Nigerian bot was correct. (And I love seeing one of those Nigerian creatures in the trap.)

Last night, a bot was caught in the trap and thrashed around for about an hour, trying to download every link off the main page. Heh heh.

How about:

"Freeze, robot. If you make one false move, I swear, I'll...inspect you!!! That's right. Go cower in fear of my inspection regiment! And if you ever come back, I'LL INSPECT YOU SOME MORE!!!

(This warning brought to you by the United Nations)"