Slashdot Mirror
Robotcop: It's the Law
Voivod writes: "Inspired by the recent Slashdot and Evolt
discussions about Blocking Bad Spiders, we set out to write an Apache module that solves this problem. The result is Robotcop and it's ready for action. We believe that it's the best solution to protecting Apache webservers from spiders currently available. Install it and help us make life hell for e-mail harvesting software!"
You just put hidden links in your HTML which only a spider's HTML parser would notice and follow. This technique is already widely used by wpoison which is a Perl CGI solution to the spider problem.
Check out the robotcop.org site. It has examples of how to set all this up.
Yes, there are probably some good spiders out there, but the good ones should pay attention to the robots file to see if there allowed to harvest there. If the spider is written to follow some basic rules of good internet behavior it won't encounter any problems.
1- why not add valid addresses that get sent to /dev/null? e.g. aaaaaa@example.com through zzzzzz@example.com. you'd get a substantial amount of traffic for that many addresses, but you could modify the amount of addresses to whatever your bandwidth/server could handle.
2- what are the legalities involved in creating a webpage with a specific email address, perhaps send.mail.here.to.be.charged@example.com, and placing it *only* on a webpage with a blatant notice of "If you mail this address you allow me to charge you $100/byte sent to this address" or a more specific terms of use (in order to encompass selling the address to others) and then charge once you get mail to that address? could a terms of use be created that would make getting money legal?
3 - how many of you use Matt Wright's (*shudder* when you hear his name) formmail? how many of you use fake formmail scripts?
for a while now i've been using a fake formmail script that only prints out a webpage saying "thank you for using this script" but doesn't actually send mail. Some people see that output (ignoring the html comment that says "I HATE YOU YOU STUPID PIECE OF SHIT"), think the script has worked, and run a program to submit spam to the script to "send" mail to a few thousand addresses.
so far my fake script has saved thousands of addresses from getting spam. some people test the script with their address first and then dont come back when they dont get the mail, but i could modify the script to send out the first mail from an ip, but not the subsequent mail.
but im wondering, has anyone else done work on this or heard of work like this?
If you don't understand what i'm talking about in point 3- "Matt Wright" (is he a real person?) has a series of scripts, one is formmail.pl which allows mail to be sent to any address. some people search for servers with formmail.pl on them and use those scripts to pseudonymously send mail to other people. We had seen this quite a bit at work, which inspired me to create the fake formmail.pl.
are there any other common scripts like formmail.pl that could be faked in the same manner?
-f
www.blackant.net