sherlock_spider

yet another one

[coyote]

UA: sherlock_spider [e-mail]
IP: 129.79.245.98 (indiana.edu)

What is it lately with educational departments and robots? And why isn't the contact e-mail in-house?

I figured this IP would be alright to post since it belongs to a public education facility - edit if needed

[keyplyr]

I see this thing also. It checks robots.txt first, so I ignore it.

But coyote, what makes you think that it is an "official" bot from the edu? Anyone connected through the university's IP range could be running their own personal bot.

For example: I'm WiFi and have a login key to our local Univ IP (ex staff), so anywhere within a 3 mile radius of the school, I can sit under a tree and run a copy of BlahBot from my laptop and crawl your site ;)

[bull]

Maybe it's an open proxy. Don't think such a bot is official. Some austrian university had a issue at the end of last year with someone logspamming for commercial sites from one of their IPs (of course reported immediately), so I don't trust university bot at all. Without an official robot info html page ("why we are doing this...") I'm banning these. robots.txt is the minimum of appropriate behaviour.

[pendanticist]

Hit me too.

sherlock_spider ([e-mail]) [google.com].

Check out the cached versions too.

129.79.245.98 (burrowww.cs.indiana.edu) comes up on one.

Smells like that one college a couple months back that had an open relay being run by five folks in that tech department. Least ways all the mails to that department bounced as no longer deliverable and I'd just pulled the data from the college website. Go figure.