May 17, 2012

111.13.8.19

I've been sitting here all day watching as I get huge numbers of refers from all over, to 8+ year old posts on USS Clueless. And the IP is always the same: 111.13.8.19

He crawled kuro5hin.org, and followed the few links there to me. He crawled janegalt.net. He crawled freerepublic.com. He crawled drweevil.org. johnquiggin.com. gnxp.com.

And he just found ai.mee.nu. I fear he's eventually going to crawl my server and hammer it into the ground.

So who is this wonderful person? A reverse DNS fails. APNIC says it belongs to China Mobile Communications Corporation. So is it a gutsy user with lots of money to pay for bandwidth? Or is it the government of China looking for things to block in the Great Firewall? Or maybe some native Chinese search engine's crawler.

Christ knows. I was seriously considering blocking him in my firewall, but if it's really a citizen in China, looking at conservative web sites, I don't really want to exclude him.

UPDATE: You know, you can hunt all through the APNIC web site and if you can find any indication of where in hell it's located, you're better than I am. Even the job listings don't say where they are.

I had to visit Wikipedia to find out that it's in Brisbane.

UPDATE: Our friend just found bojack.org and samizdata.net. Also perfidy.org. ashbrook.org.

UPDATE: He just started dumping my site.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 05:10 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 233 words, total size 1 kb.

1 It seems... unlikely... that it's a sole user, don't you think?

Posted by: Wonderduck at May 17, 2012 06:38 PM (6CHh4)

2

It's running way to fast for it to be someone sitting at a browser. But it's not impossible that it's someone's personal computer running a massive crawler.

I think it's far more likely to be someone gathering information for a search engine, though. It doesn't seem like the government would use an IP from that block.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 17, 2012 07:18 PM (+rSRq)

3 Actually, there's another possibility: it could be the government testing the Great Firewall.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 17, 2012 07:19 PM (+rSRq)

4 It's most likely just a spambot or fake site bot, looking for raw materials. These days spambots can generate seemingly intelligible spam posts according to content of the blog it's posting on; and fake sites with entirely copied content have been around for some time, generally used to affect search engine results.

Posted by: cuc at May 18, 2012 12:00 AM (AOjlv)

5 And the majority of blog comment spam I see these days originated from China.

Posted by: cuc at May 18, 2012 12:01 AM (AOjlv)

6 I've known page sucking/Mirroring programs that if not set up correctly will try to download the entire internet.  They can be particularly annoying if they hit a sort of infinite loop (common with the CopperMine photo gallery) and really suck up your bandwidth allotment.

Posted by: Mauser at May 18, 2012 12:25 AM (cZPoz)

7 I'd be interested to know if it's just getting the HTML, or if it's actually requesting the images as well.  If it's ignoring the images, it's probably a search engine.

Posted by: David at May 18, 2012 08:12 AM (+yn5x)

8 No, it isn't taking pictures. But that doesn't preclude it from being the Chinese government.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 18, 2012 08:50 AM (+rSRq)

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