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'Scrapers' Dig Deep For Data On Web
srwellman writes "The practice of Web 'scraping' is growing as many firms offer to collect personal, and potentially incriminating, data about users from their social networking profiles and discussions. Many companies even collect online conversations and personal details from social networks, job sites and forums where people might discuss their lives and even potentially sensitive data, such as health issues. These scrapers operate in a legal grey area leaving many users exposed." We ban scrapers like this regularly here simply for not adhering to the rules spelled out in robots.txt.
You mean like Google already does for its advertisers? In fact, one of the related links in the article is a story about Google titled Google Agonizes on Privacy as Ad World Vaults Ahead, discussing their plans for utilizing their vast archive of valuable user data. The battle for online privacy was lost long ago.
Is it legal to USE information gathered in this way to discriminate against someone if it was gathered with methods contrary to a site's TOS?
I'm not on FB, Twitter, MyCloud or whatever else, so there's no data out there about me. If there's nothing to harvest then they can't harvest it - I'd rather be classified as 'boring' or 'not with it' (whatever the fuck 'It' is), than have stuff out there that might come back to bite me in the ass in 10 or 20 years time.
That Anonymous Coward guy is going to have a mailbox full of goatse spam.
Now what kind of individual stands to gain from the of generating this rumour? Lets see now ...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
He used a pseudonym on the message boards, but his PatientsLikeMe profile linked to his blog, which contains his real name.
I don't think we need to dig any deeper to come to the conclusion that this guy is an idiot.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
This was talked about back in October:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/10/15/1340244/Data-Miners-Scraping-Away-Our-Privacy?from=rss
I thought the guy in the picture looked familiar...
"We ban scrapers like this regularly here simply for not adhering to the rules spelled out in robots.txt." Hah! robots.txt doesn't stop any decent crawler
Known robots, and scrapers
IP addresses that do not honor /robots.txt.
and IP addresses that robotically submit spam on robots.txt disallowed HTML feedback feedback forms
Much web scraping can be automatically detected.
Sites like Facebook/social networking sites are perfect places to trap/detect scrapers, if they would be willing to contribute to a DNSBL
I've always wondered -- how would this work for future politicians from our generation?
All your comments, history etc are probably available in a multitude of places, and anyone with enough motivation can go around digging and find some pretty serious material. Combined with the fact that most people know (or care) little to nothing about privacy, you will have an entire generation of users with a good chunk of their private lives and opinions shared out on the Internet for everyone to see.
And knowing how we all have skeletons in our closets, and how we've all been immature at some point in time or the other in our lives, how many future politicians candidates can claim to be "squeaky clean"?
I mean, I see this primarily as a problem for the right more than the left, given how their voter base expects them to have "conservative values" or some such nonsense.
Getting banned sure will though.
Well, no. That's why they get banned. Also, I think your definition of "decent" is a little skewed in this context. The decent thing for any crawler to do is respect robot.txt files and the rules they contain. Of course, they would first have to look for a robot.txt file, which one would think any decent crawler would do.
"We ban scrapers like this regularly here simply for not adhering to the rules spelled out in robots.txt."
Hah! robots.txt doesn't stop any decent crawler
Yes... not being stopped by robots.txt is the reason they ban them. Which implies that they're using some form of ban that does not rely on robots.txt (and which may or may not be effective).
Your offerings please Anonymous Coward, keep them coming!
What's to stop me from 'scraping' the info? What's to stop me from simply downloading the entire site with something like this? Slowly if needed to avoid arousing suspicion..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I did expect the Spanish Inqueisiton!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I don't think there can be such a "ban" - if humans can browse a website, then crawlers can crawl.
robots.txt isn't meant to have any enforcement capability; by its nature it's just an advisory mechanism telling bots who and what they will and will not accept. If a bot chooses to ignore it (as pretty much all of the types of bots described in this article do), it's up to the site admins to enforce it via IP bans etc.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Hoping somebody is scraping this message.
Soon as I click to read the comments, the ad on the right is for a web scraping solution.
However, there are patterns of browsing that are clearly not human. Humans do not make 100 requests in a 10 second timespan, nor do humans traverse every post made by every user.
Yes, it is imperfect and you might ban an occasional human, but this is essentially the situation we have with spam filtering. It is a bit sad that the Internet is becoming so adversarial, but that is what we face.
Palm trees and 8
You're telling me that stuff on a public web site is public?
Made me lol.
Because the public sector has very little time to handle FOIA requests and they sometimes cost more money to complete than I'm willing to pay (usually because they don't do much of their own data work in-house and have to call on a contractor to do it for me), I use their websites to glean the data I want.
Last week I gave a talk about using SAS to do screen scraping and then perform analysis on the data of jail inmate registries and level 3 sex offenders in MN. I have dashboards of the data available on my website and as I mentioned in my presentation it has even been used to help one county avoid what could have been a serious privacy issue.
So while there are any number of pitfalls to screen scraping (not understanding the meaning of the data and trends, being fed incomplete or purposefully incorrect data, or even being banned outright) screen scraping can be great for learning about and reporting on the public sector when they are physically or financially incapable or simply unwilling to do it themselves.
Slashdot is filled to the brim with people who take the time to create an alias and then list their homepage on their profile, which of course, is displayed in a link on the same line as their alias in the post they just made.
I click on those homepages whenever I read something really stupid or ridiculous or inflammatory or completely polar opposite my perspective. Which is to say, I click on them A LOT. I am amazed at how many of these "homepages" are links to commerce sites, or sites advertising some kind of service.
"Why," I inevitably ask myself, "would I ever buy anything from you, you knucklehead, you?"
It's like the guy who walks into a business meeting with a potential new client, someone he's never met before, wearing a big "I Love Obama!" button on his jacket. Or an equally large "Palin/Romney '12" button. Sure, you appreciate their passion -- maybe... if you agree with their POV -- but you immediately question their common sense, maturity, and business acumen.
I would like to see the profile they have build of me.
a.c.
The company was SEM/SEO then they moved to social optimization and scraping. It was a black art, like the SEO stuff, and totally dependent on the provider (in this case facebook and twitter) to not change anything. It's the same basic the problem with SEO and Google; if facebook's (or Google's) API coughs the social media scrapers (or SEM/SEO people) get pneumonia. If Facebook wants to stop it, they can do so fairly easily.
Unfortunately for privacy, a huge part of FB's business model (like Google) is selling that data to the scrapers and the scrapers' clients.
I think the point they're making is that crawlers which do not obey the rules spelled out in robots.txt are blocked.
Face it, the type of people who go into marketing have very little to offer this world. Their whole reason for existence is to hopefully sell something to somebody who might not otherwise buy it. The only redeeming aspect of marketing is that it is a non-violent sinkhole in which to drop money, vs say a war in some God forsaken desert.
Have you ever met a marketing/advertising person who actually liked people?
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
Humans do not make 100 requests in a 10 second timespan, nor do humans traverse every post made by every user..
That's what I use a Greasemonkey script for, you insensitive clod!
Collecting data about others is somewhat an essential freedom. But my view and the modern view differ as most people do not feel the same way. But if we take the usual view any company collecting data about a specific person could be charged with stalking. We usually think of a pervert stalking a child or pretty girl. But stalking is stalking regardless of whether it is a corporation or a pervert. The motive for the stalking is irrelevant. Considering the current mood huge civil suits might take place and even criminal prosecutions might be applied. This is one demonstration of why hacking and social engineering need to be legal. After all, how will you ever know to what degree others are studying you without being able to penetrate their data? Restricting hacking is a path to tyranny that is quite direct and predictable. The natural balance is to allow all people and groups to completely study each other in great depth.
iptables -a INPUT -j DROP $Bad_Scraper_IP_Address
this is where the REGEX work comes into play, and yes, it does work.
This is slashdot. We know what regexp is. We don't need to have it capitalized or explained. We also know what perl and python are. Please stop capitalizing things. Also, while you're at it, please stop putting "random" things in "quotation marks."
And I'm sure you're capable of writing a crawler to go to a /. ID page and compile a list of all their posts. This is not a black magic art. Call us when you can do something special.
mod_security is pretty handy at spotting crawler patterns (you have to be a really weird human or a well designed crawler to look like something you're not).
Add a line in your acceptable use / EULA section stating that you expect the user of the account to be human and that any attempt to scrape the data off of the server is fined at $100,000 per message, plus $10,000 to each message author.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
A smart discrete scraper will scrape breadth-first, ie: scrape 100 websites alternating the next page from each site in turn, instead of the next page on a single site until that site is finished. Some scraping on active sites like Slashdot or just Google's spidering is never done; It just continues on as new content is created. It would be easy for a scraper to act just like a human on Slashdot, just keep clicking 'refresh' every once in a while. An astro-turf post from GNA would really throw the admins off the trail.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
The report is back sir, and the results are disturbing. Almost everybody likes sex, and a lot of them are weird. The ones that don't like sex have very strange hobbies. The ones that don't abuse illegal drugs are abusing legal drugs, and almost nobody weighs what they say or looks like their online picture. What should we do?
(boss pauses for a moment) "Don't hire anybody ever again".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Its ridiculous to expect users to anticipate and thwart privacy invasions. These companies could be shut down overnight (or at least rendered illegal) with common-sense legislation. The problem is not users, it is their bought-and-paid-for "representative" government(s) which sell out their constituents to be deceived and abused by sleazy industries.
Our SiteTruth system does some "scraping". We're looking for the name and address of the company behind the web site, so we can check the business out. We also look for ad links and a few other things, like BBBonline seals, which we check. We use a user agent name of SiteTruth.com site rating system. We don't look very deeply into a site; if after examining the most likely 20 pages, we haven't found out who runs the site, we figure they're not going to tell us. The site is down-rated accordingly.
Our experience is that 0.1% of sites have a "robots.txt" file that tells us to not look at any pages at all. We don't look at those sites, and their SiteTruth rating information says "Blocked". Total exclusion of crawlers is rare. Most sites want some visibility.
One of the more amusing uses of a "robots.txt" file used to be seen on Marchex (the "What you need, when you need it" domainer) pages. The site wasn't blocked from crawling, but the link to the page that told you about Marchex was. That, we suspect, was to keep search engines from noticing that all those domains were really one business. That didn't help Marchex much. Marchex (NASDAQ: MCHX) is still around, stock way down from the peak and reporting a slight loss this quarter.
We do have one exception to obeying the "robots.txt" file. We look at the home page of the site to see if it's a redirect before looking at the "robots.txt" file. Some sites have both a redirect and a "keep out" robots.txt file on the same domain. This is like posting signs that say "Keep Out" and "Please Use Other Door" on the same entrance. That contradiction was apparently a workaround for an old Google crawler bug. Google would index both "example.com" and "www.example.com" separately, then consider them duplicates, which caused some SEO problems.
Actually logging into sites from a crawler is just wrong. I'm amazed that a deep pocket like Nielsen would do that.
... nor do humans traverse every post made by every user.
...unless they have a fistful of mod points to spend...heck, sometimes I'm just very interested in a story and want to see what everyone has to say about it. True, that doesn't happen often, and I certainly don't read 10 posts a second, but it does happen...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
If the scrapers are already not following the rules laid out in the robots.txt file, what's to say they'll honor your ban. They'll find some way around any technical means of blocking them, in time.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
On this topic, here is some bad practices in HR that needs to end:
1. Hiring based on stereotypes is NOT a good idea.
2. The purpose of HR should not be to minimize legal liability.
3. The illusion that celebrities are perfect needs to end.
4. Filtering people based on health problems to minimize health insurance costs is not a good idea.
5. Not hiring people based on debt creates a paradox for those who have to pay it off.
And as a side note, companies with seriously broken HR often have other problems too.
Actually, it stops ALL "decent" crawlers. It's the ones that behave indecently that ignore robots.txt.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Even though you never post a thing, someone else may post something about you. You may already be tagged in multiple photos on Facebook. You may have loan applications visible on the web. Your information is not entirely under your control - with pervasive digital storage, constant security challenges, and an increasing cultural trend to blurring the line between public and private, there is a growing chance that your information will leak out into the public.
Would that be legal? Could I setup a company that collected DNA samples without their owners permission(say, by tying the hair clippings from a salon to the CC that paid for the cut)? Could I sell that info to the government?
If no one's done it, someone should, if for no other reason than to scare the shit out of people and hopefully wake them up.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
I've been doing that for years now, & for a good purpose: To populate a custom HOSTS file with data to block out known bad sites & servers + bad hosts-domains from 7-8 very reputable sources for said material.
I do this as an added layered security approach to things online for myself, my family, & friends... it works for faster & safer online experiences.
(Simply because this file covers ALL webbound apps you have, & it's run @ the TCP/IP stack level in kernel mode (acting merely as a filter for that system to utilze)).
I've just built/co-built/rebuilt a system for that that is better in many ways than its predecessors, in fact...
(3rd one now, 1st was in Borland Delphi Object Pascal, 2nd was Ms-Access SQL (for normalization portion only though), & lately it's Python with REGEX work)...
In fact, that system's running on multiple threads in timings as I type this, and even when I sleep...
(Which takes a burden of 20 minutes work away from me I used to have to do in the a.m. or evenings, before... now? Now I don't HAVE to, anymore, lol, YEA!)
That "all said & aside":
This type of system's NOT THAT TOUGH TO BUILD, not really, because tools like PyThon, Perl, & even std. *NIX shell commands can be "popped together" with some regex work to do so... pretty damned easily too, once you have the "base toolkit" & process in place for it, & really for ANY KIND OF DATA ONLINE!
Too bad folks are using it to potentially & perhaps more than potentially bogus purposes vs. one another... this is human nature I suppose, the beat side (unless the person's a known killer & such, then I'd think it was fair to warn others perhaps... there's always "shades of gray" in any situation, & I don't like "absolutes")
I guess what I am trying to say here though, is this:
Not ALL "Screen-Scraping" going on, is bad...
(My reasons for that, are from what I consider the most insightful portion of your reply below (really well said man)):
---
"Sadly, the Internet has become more of an adversarial game than a way to unite people." - by betterunixthanunix (980855) on Wednesday April 13, @01:16PM (#35809838)
Sometimes, it seems that way, doesn't it? Especially with articles like this one... really, Really, REALLY "well-put" on your part though!
However - Again/Lastly in closing: Not all of the "screen-scraping" stuff online is for "nefarious purposes", sometimes, it's for the general good of others too (per my reason for doing it myself, noted above @ the top of my reply to you).
APK
P.S.=> Didn't mean to "ramble", or go into "too much detail" (because with a "handle/username" like yours, you probably KNOW the detail I am guessing here... the detail was more for those that don't know this stuff) - I really liked how you closed you post though, made me think a bit is all... apk
Please don't respond to Mr One-Note Samba. As you can see, it just encourages him.
Mod him down if you've mod points and you feel so inclined; otherwise just ignore him.
They ban scrapers precisely because they don't follow robots.txt.
It's funny seeing an ac troll run from replying here http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2082332&cid=35811080
Funny how his "speaking on behalf of /." for everyone seems to have been his undoing... lol!
(After all - he RAN from replying when I asked if HE was "all of /." (which we clearly know, he's not (or was it just you again, trolling as AC?)).
So, go ahead: Hit others with your registered 'LUSER" account effete, & useless 'down-mod points", instead of facing the music in the URL above.
(Thanks for proving a point here: That you're the TRULY "anonymous coward" here (and I stress, coward))
APK
P.S.=> Yes, I am assuming that you're probably just TomHudson doing this ac trolling of myself, as is per his usual, shown here quoted in his own words, no less:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1646272&cid=32150544
Some people are pitiful... & there's no hiding from statements like that one shown in that URL above... apk
CmdrTaco writes: "We ban scrapers like this regularly here simply for not adhering to the rules spelled out in robots.txt."
Well, I put ok.txt in my robots.txt file, and lo and behold the ill-behaved slashdot code went ahead and did a GET on it anyway. Then it had the gall to incorrectly state that I was coming from a proxy.
"We ban scrapers like this regularly here simply for not adhering to the rules spelled out in robots.txt." Hah! robots.txt doesn't stop any decent crawler
I think you misread that. It doesn't say "we ban scrapers, for not adhering to the rules spelled out, in robots.txt", it says "we ban scrapers for not adhering to the rules (spelled out in robots.txt)". The banning itself will not be done using robots.txt... which really should be obvious.
"You Gonna Get Scraped"
When they say ban, they mean IP ban presumably. As in, the robot doesn't follow robots.txt, and because of this, they get their ass kicked, and banned. That makes a lot more sense I think.
Appended to the end of comments you post. The maximum is 120 characters.
...
robots.txt is meant to govern honest crawlers, nothing else. There are measures you can take besides robots.txt to hinder a crawler if they aren't following the rules.
I don't see a gray area at all. If these scrapers are "hacking" their way into web sites, they are cyber-criminals. Plain and simple.
...between generations. I'm not sure how children or students will take you seriously once they will be able to see every dumb thing you did when you were their age.
So... can you say the same?
HOSTS files are free, versatile, reliable, & easy to work with, for speed, security, & anonymity online as their results... & it's very noticeable on ALL fronts noted, especially in combination.
HOSTS FILES GIVE MYSELF, or ANYONE, THESE BENEFITS:
---
---
(BOTTOM-LINE - I think of them as helping a PC online be the fastest car on Top Gear, with the proven safety of a Volvo @ the same time, from the same free package... & as for it actually working out that way? It does... &, I don't just *think* it: I KNOW IT/SEE IT/FEEL IT!)
APK
P.S.=> To all of those, & you overlooking their merit, due to my usage of the HOSTS file? Well, I get them... You, by way of comparison? Do not.
It's your money & speed + security online after all... apk
So... can you say the same?
HOSTS files are free, versatile, reliable, & easy to work with, for speed, security, & anonymity online as their results... & it's very noticeable on ALL fronts noted, especially in combination.
HOSTS FILES GIVE MYSELF, or ANYONE, THESE BENEFITS:
---
---
(BOTTOM-LINE - I think of them as helping a PC online be the fastest car on Top Gear, with the proven safety of a Volvo @ the same time, from the same free package... & as for it actually working out that way? It does... &, I don't just *think* it: I KNOW IT/SEE IT/FEEL IT!)
APK
P.S.=> To all of those being experienced in MY favor:
(& you overlooking their being HOSTS Files' merits)
Due to my usage of the HOSTS file? Well, I get the benefits listed above... You, by way of comparison? Do not. It's your money & speed + security online after all... apk
Robots.txt only stops decent crawlers: Ones whose operators have set them to follow the directives in robots.txt files.
On the other hand, I would guess that blocking the IP addresses of "users" who are bulk downloading multiple discussion threads simultaneously would be approximately 100% effective. Guess which method ./ uses to ban scrapers?
Open source has an uphill battle educating the masses as more uneducated people join it with zero expectacions of passing some required level of readiness prior to being let loose online.
Merge a good version of a "secure" OS, like Debian, say, Ubuntu with a paranoid version out there where your proposed security is ON by default --no need to know where to get Adblock for grandma's firefox. Test and tweak to ensure the security doesn't cripple the top 50 websites, (youtube, facebook, myspace, hotmail, google services, etc) and call it "Securiva 2012" so that the newbies go "hmm, it *must* be good because it's selling a year in *advance* of 2011, like any good new car model (free discourages people, but good enough things will get pirated anyway). Sell it at the bargain bins next to those 10 dollar games. Next year, do the same battery of tests to remove/add sites, and release "Securiva 2013". Better yet, make it automated by default a la Chrome. Make sure your users understand that their data / programs need to be manually checked between scheduled upgrades, or perhaps charge extra for use of the "the cloud" to keep the data safe and just test the programs.
Speaking of forking, I have marveled how forks of Good(TM) Open Source distros are so obscure to even us IT geeks that even if good, they have no chance of getting the attention they deserve and helping out the common unprotected newb. For every, say, 10000 Windows users there may be 1 user of $TOP_BRAND_LINUX, but why doesn't every $TOP_BRAND_LINUX user know and PREFER $NEWERTOP_BRAND_LINUX_FORK? To illustrate more or less, pretend instead of OSs, we're comparing adoption of Google Chrome among geeks to how many geeks even KNOW about Chromium. Let's ignore informed /. geeks --think about your wife's or grandma's "assisted" choices when all they have is US for security consultation.
Chrome vs. Chromium (& how many people actually KNOW about the latter's existence, period...)
APK
P.S.=> I use the latter... apk
Well, considering that there are two additional escalation steps:
*) emulate a human-like access pattern that works at a human-speed.
*) passively record data via a proxy when you normally browse.
Add to this multiple IP addresses, and catching your scraper becomes so much more problematic.
"How can you be "110% Secure", if all you do is disable the ability to look up the IP address from the domain name?" - by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14, @02:48AM (#35815214)
Most malicious sites aren't driven by IP addresses in attacks. Most attacks are driven by URL's in phishing mails, or malicious links, or bogus adbanners. In fact, the ratio of that is roughly 99.9% in favor of them using hosts-domain/subdomain names, because they pay for them.
I.E.-> You use an IP Address, & once it's "shut down"? It's shut down. HOWEVER, if the authorities shut down a host-domain name of a bogus server/site?? Well - The hacker/crackers can just go to another hosting provider & UP THEY GO AGAIN (either way (ip addy or host-domain name)? The bad guys pay for them, so using hosts/domain names can be RECYCLED & reused again, simply by changing hosting providers/registrars/etc.!).
(The RBN was notorious for this... as is Zeus/SpyEye currently in fact...)
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"A hosts file doesn't work at all against IP address links that do not have to be looked up." - by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14, @02:48AM (#35815214)
Right, which is the "why" of WHY I noted using firewalls too... I put any malicious IP addresses (yes, my sources put those up too) into firewall table rules (in software, or my firewall-router (linksys)).
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"Also, do you really have a 950,001-line hosts file?" - by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14, @02:48AM (#35815214)
Yes, and it's growing right now as I write this... I have been building it up (and entries out of it when sites prove clean, my sources DO provide removal lists too) since 1998 or thereabouts in fact...
APK
P.S.=> Would you like to try it? It works... it REALLY, works (for better speed, security, & even some better "anonymity" online)... apk
"Then you assume incorrectly... "APK" - by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14, @04:23PM (#35821728)
Or, did YOU not say others should stalk & troll me as AC replies, here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1646272&cid=32150544
You're FLAT-BUSTED, as a stalking ac troller, TomHudson, & funniest part is? BY YOUR OWN WORDS captured in that link above, & this quote from it, verbatim:
"Wait until he starts on another kick, then reply to him as an AC. It's the new meme". by tomhudson (43916) on Sunday May 09 2010, @08:29PM (#32150544) Homepage Journal
No, no - the "new meme" is EXPOSING you as a stalking, trolling, libelling scumbag tomhudson, & YOU'RE DOING THE JOB FOR ME!
APK
P.S.=> Thanks for being SO especially "transparently stupid", most of all, & easily caught in the act + making it easy for me to do so & expose you all in the same "motion" by your own words being your UNDOING... apk
"I know who you are and how to find you. If you don't stop pretending to be me, I am going to come to your house and take care of you myself. - by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14, @04:23PM (#35821728)
Additionally, it APPEARS you are trying to "impersonate me"... poorly done job!
(I.E.-> You don't have my posting "style" down, @ ALL... you'd make a LOUSY "forger", that's certain enough!)
APK
P.S.=> Also, lastly? IF you're trying to "threaten or scare" me?? LOL, come to my house then & face me then... we'd see who "scares who" then. Of course, you'd NEVER do it "man to man", this I am certain of based on your ac stalking/trolling b.s. directed MY way here tomhudson!
First off, lol, I wager this much:
You'd be slaughtered BY THIS NEIGHBORHOOD ITSELF first
(Unfortunately, it's one of the most violent crime areas in this nation - 3rd place last time I checked in fact (after larger metros like NYC/L.A. etc), but... nobody "messes with me" in this neighborhood - I took care of THAT, long ago in fact, & the "creeps" know better, word "gets around", fast, once you "park one of that kind good"))... apk
Anything on arstechnica? Is a lie, or it was my posts being edited by them, and not only on THEIR forums, but on their members' forums. Case in point:
Jeremy Reimer of arstechnica was caught IMPERSONATING ME on his own forums, and admitted it at Windows IT Pro (and on his forums before he moved them to another hosting provider & started it again)... so, you think arstechnica doesn't pull that kind of crap? See this:
"Anyway the "APK" registered here is just an affectionate clone of the original. In fact I prefer him to the original." - Jeremy Reimer - March 25, 2005
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1300193&cid=28685295
and here also (Windows IT Pro magazine forums):
http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/internals-and-architecture/the-memory-optimization-hoax#feedbackAnchor
Heck, if you look at the latter one? Reimer even impersonated another person named Martin Meszaros as well. The arstechnica bunch? They have NO problem breaking laws either.
E.G.=> Some of their members (2) even had their websites removed in whole (Jay Little from CrystalTech.com & petitiononline.com) & in part (Jeremy Reimer from Shaw in Canada) for IMPERSONATING MYSELF, email harassing myself, making libellous altered photos of myself, childish songs, DEATH THREATS (this made it serious) & more, which a Det. Felton of B.C. Canada where Reimer lives helped put an end to, finally.
The one that sticks out there, though, is IMPERSONATING ME... which it seems you appear to be trying to do, now, even.
Well, well, judging on past happenings? You must be from ARSTECHNICA then! (the home of the underachiever online...)
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"And no, I most definitely am NOT TomHudson" - by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15, @02:17AM (#35825768)
He's the only one that I know of that trolls me as "anonymous coward" postings as he has been caught in it, red-handed, and telling others to do so, here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1646272&cid=32150544
So, it stands to reason you're just he, doing it yet again here now.
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"And you are not Alexander Peter Kowalski." - by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15, @02:17AM (#35825768)
Uhm, last time I checked (when I woke up this a.m. in fact, lol), I was!
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"Maybe you are Yuri Klastalov?" - by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15, @02:17AM (#35825768)
WoW... there's a name: Afaik? He is part of the RBN (Russian Business Network) & he hated anyone who was helping to secure Windows for users (which I have actively been doing since 1997 online in fact)... which would make some sense, considering that botnet was floored right around the time he put up his Twitter post saying "Alexander Peter Kowalski can suck my sweaty cock" or something along those profane lines...
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"You've been using my name for at least 10 years, tho." - by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15, @02:17AM (#35825768)
No, more like 45++ yrs. (since I came into this world in fact)...
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"And putting it on your CRAPWARE!!! BUT YOU ARE NOT ME." - by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15, @02:17AM (#35825768)
Uhm, 1st of all? The link you used?? Dead. Long dead in fact, as I have not had a website @ pixelstation.com outta Trinidad since the late 1990s... what are you, in a time-machine, lol, or WHAT??
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"Don't forget, I know where you live" - by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15, @02:17AM (#35825768)
Then, "bring it on", but TO MY FACE then... heck, you'd never even make it to
Answer the question. We already have a good idea that it's Tom Hudson, based on a quote of his own words saying he was doing that here:
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"Wait until he starts on another kick, then reply to him as an AC. It's the new meme". - by tomhudson (43916) on Sunday May 09 2010, @08:29PM (#32150544) Homepage Journal
QUOTED FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1646272&cid=32150544
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So, why are you denying you are merely tomhudson the ac stalker troll of /. then?
So, why are you denying you are merely tomhudson the ac stalker troll of /. then?
Because I am not tomhudson, moron.
You are completely pathetic.