Who on earth is lmspider?

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Who on earth is lmspider?

new one on me...

Tippy

9:18 pm on Mar 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

During the ever-exciting trawl through my web logs this stuck out as a little strange...

lmspider lmspider@scansoft.com

As I understand it, ScanSoft do a bunch of OCR and graphics packages and a fair amount of speech synthesis / recognition. Their website shows no inclination into moving into the search engine business, yet yesterday they were more active on my site than YaSlurp! and Googlebot.

Anyone else seeing this, or have any idea what it's up to?

Cheers,
Scott

thoellri

5:44 pm on Mar 4, 2004 (gmt 0)

Same here - they started scanning <snip> on 2/23 and have been back almost daily. It's always the same IP and the same behaviour:


192.133.61.40 - - [02/Mar/2004:01:27:15 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 402 "-" "lmspider (lmspider@scansoft.com)"
192.133.61.40 - - [02/Mar/2004:02:01:53 -0700] "GET /blog/archives/000055.html HTTP/1.0" 200 12568 "-" "lmspider lmspider@scansoft.com"
192.133.61.40 - - [02/Mar/2004:02:08:08 -0700] "GET /blog/archives/000054.html HTTP/1.0" 200 16166 "-" "lmspider lmspider@scansoft.com"
192.133.61.40 - - [02/Mar/2004:02:13:02 -0700] "GET /blog/archives/000053.html HTTP/1.0" 200 9567 "-" "lmspider lmspider@scansoft.com"

I don't see them violating robot-rules.

I sent them an email on 3/4 and asked them what the purpose of the spider was. If I don't hear back from them within a week, I'll ban lmspider on all the sites I administer.

Tobias

[edited by: jeremy_goodrich at 6:27 pm (utc) on Mar. 4, 2004]
[edit reason] no urls, please, thanks! [/edit]

BohrMe

1:06 am on Mar 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

Did they ever return your emails? I've sent them a few and haven't heard back from any of them.

thoellri

5:26 pm on Mar 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

Nope - they never returned my email(s). I banned them on my site (via robots.txt) and they seem to obey the robot-rules. I also heard from a number of other people that they stopped lmspider on their sites. I also posted a note about it on my site <snip>.

Tobias

[edited by: jeremy_goodrich at 12:00 am (utc) on Mar. 14, 2004]
[edit reason] See TOS thanks! [/edit]

Tippy

9:41 pm on Mar 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

Tobias,

Thanks for replying btw. Was waiting to see if they replied to my emails before replying but I guess it's a shy little spider.

It's also going to be a banned little spider, at least as far my corner of the web goes.

Thanks,
Scott