IP Blocking

[digitalgirl]

Hi everyone,

I hope this topic belongs here, if not just let me know and I will know better next time around. Quickly I wanted to find out if blocking an IP address is legal? Does it also work? Thank you for your help.

[Air]

Blocking an IP adderess is legal, in fact sometimes very necessary, yes it does work i.e. it prevents the machine with that IP address from accessing the site it is blocked from.

>I hope this topic belongs here
This isn't a bad place for it, the only forum better might have been Website Technology Issues :)

Oh and Welcome to WmW.

[digitalgirl]

Thanks for the warm welcome ;-) I have a problem with a particular person unfortunately. This person/s is visiting our site 2-3 times a day for the past 12 months. He/she will copy our site by making identical banners, dividers, graphics in general, web copy, etc. than in a few days put a silly disclaimer to his/her site saying some other company (no names mentioned) have been stealing from him/her.

If you were in my shoes *hope you like high heels* would you block his/her IP? Will this trigger something legal etc. toward me?

I guess this is not a tecnical question, but I will ask. Do you think I should take this person serious enough to trouble myself? Are you still happy to have me here? :-)

Thanks for all the help!

digitalGiRl

[Air]

>If you were in my shoes *hope you like high heels* would you block his/her IP?
High heels? only on weekends :) If I were in your shoes I'd contact their ISP and get their account terminated, if they host their own server then I'd have a lawyer send them a cease and desist notice.

You could bait them with an image containing a hidden watermark so that it would be easy to show where the images came from. If you really don't want to take the other actions mentioned, then just block their access, no one has a right to access your site let alone steal from it, if you don't want them to.

>Are you still happy to have me here? :-)
Absolutely!

[digitalgirl]

Hi Air ;)

well the thing is this person imitates my images, never actually uses mine. I always use digimark on them anyhow.

If I could only tell you the whole story...*sigh* you would never keep those heels on! Would be tossing them at this person actually :(

So, I will block! Now let me see if I can do it! Thank you, thank you, I love this place ;)

DigitalGiRl

[oilman]

Hi digitalgirl. Thanks for dropping by and welcome.

Here's a quick way to block using .htaccess. Just copy and paste the following into your .htaccess file and change the IP to match the offender and VOILA!!

order deny,allow
deny from xxx.yyy.zzz

[miles]

Is there a way to track someone taking text or other things off of a site. With the exception of seeing their site. If so how?

[Xoc]

No, there is no way to track that. The web works by copying the HTML file onto the local machine, then displaying it into a browser. There is no way to tell what happens to that file once it is copied to the end user's machine. If they choose to put it into a web page, there is no way to prevent that. If you are concerned, do a search in Google and Fast for your content. If it is publically available on the web, you'll find it.

A common technique used in publishing, is to purposefully create a typo in some content. That is used to prove plagerism.

[miles]

Xoc thank you for the information. I was wondering if the typo will throw the engines off when searching for KW content. Or are you refering to a small word other than a KW. Thanks for the help.

[Xoc]

I'm referring to some small glitch that would be extremely improbable for two separate people to independently make. If you have to take somebody to court, it can be used as evidence.

For example, if one print publisher does an edition of some work, it might throw an inversion of two letters onto page 110 of the book. If another publisher scans the first publisher's edition and produces a copy, and gets sued, the first publisher can show the typo being exactly reproduced as evidence that there was plagerism involved, and that the copy wasn't independently developed. Copyright law involves the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. So if I print an idea, even if I use the same words as you do, you have to prove that I copied from you and didn't independently develop it. The typo is pretty strong evidence that I did.

Edited by: Xoc

[miles]

Thank you again I will keep that in mind.

[digitalgirl]

Hi Oilman ;)

I downloaded something which I installed in my htacsess. Than I typed a code in my html, now let's see if this baby works.

Have you ever had to block anyone? Did they find out and if so what happened?

Thanks for the help.

[DaveAtIFG]

Hey miles - FindSame [findsame.com] works very well for finding duplicated text, it may be useful to you.

[miles]

DaveAtIFG Thanks for that tool.

[mivox]

I downloaded something which I installed in my htacsess. Than I typed a code in my html, now let's see if this baby works

That doesn't sound quite right... it seems like you should have had to type something into your .htaccess... specifically: "deny from (insert offending IP here)" (ie- deny from 111.222.333.444), and you shouldn't have had to do anything to your html.

the .htaccess file is just a plain text file, so anything you need to add to it, you should be able to add with Notepad.

I've banned IPs from my site before, and the only thing that happened is that I never saw them come back.

[oilman]

>>Have you ever had to block anyone?
Can't say that I have. But then again, I don't have anything worth stealing ;)

I'd say it will be pretty hard to block someone entirely though. It's easy enough to surf through a proxy or get a friend to download the site or got to the local library etc. If someone really wants your content you're gonna be fairly helpless to stop them short of legal action. At best IP blocking sends a message and makes them work a little harder.

Best of luck to you. :)

[JamesR]

How can you tell if you are about to ban a static or dynamic IP other than if you notice the same IP repeated?

[digitalgirl]

Hi Oilman,

I know that this person has 4 static IP addresses in the office. I want to make things harder for this weirdo so that he/she actually has to work his/her lazy behind off to get to my site.

Your site is wonderful and who ever messes with you should be either crazy or HE-MAN ;)

Funny as it may sound this person also e-mails me and calls me. Yeah, I am so cute, the nut jobs never get enough of me ;-)

Thanks for all the help. Maybe one day I can say more to ya'll!

[digitalgirl]

Mivox,

I downloaded blockfrog. They should have named it blockjacka**, but hey!

I tried to use the deny in my .htaccess, but for some reason it just is not blocking. So I am going to try this blockfrog, but it's very time consuming to add a script on each page of my site. I have a 80-100 page site.

Where do you think I am going wrong with the "deny" in htaccess file?

First when I opened it I typed in deny and than the IP address and than went to save it. Once re-opened it I notice that it had not saved it at all. So I downloaded, retyped the deny etc., saved it and than uploaded it back up and overwrote the old one.

I viewed it and the IP was there, but my brother could still get in my site, so what did I do wrong :( ? Can you help? Pretty please!

[digitalgirl]

I type in this order>>

order deny,allow
allow from all
deny from 222.22.222.222

and upload it back. Is this wrong?

[Air]

The statement in your .htaccess should look like this:

deny from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
eg.:
deny from 192.168.0.5
or
deny from 192.168

would deny access to anyone with an IP starting with 192.168.

the response to the user with that IP address should look like this:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /index.html on this server.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Apache/1.3.12 Server at dev.air.com Port 80

[digitalgirl]

I have tried:

deny from ***.*** and entered the exact ip address and it did not work. My question is this, my htaccess is under admin and my website is under htdocs, they are both under my main website name.

Do you think this would cause the problem? Should I have the htaccess under my htdocs instead? That does sound stupid though. Darn, I am mad!

[Air]

order deny,allow
allow from all

Did you leave those lines in? If you did I would remove them and just leave the "deny from xx.xx" statement.

It is probaly a good idea to move the .htaccess to the htdoc directory, it could be that over rides in .htaccess have been defined form that path forward, so moving it is worth a try.

Ok, see how that goes ....

[digitalgirl]

Weird but I already have an htaccess in the htdoc directory and it contains different things. I am afraid that if I mess with it I won't be allowed back in.

I will add a line and see what it does, BRB.

[digitalgirl]

Nope, nothing works. I blocked it partially and we were able to see some pages and not some of them. I have tried all versions of

<Limit GET POST>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from all
</Limit>

you can imagine. As well as plain old deny from ***.*** etc. under htdocs, root directory and my admin.

We were able to see some pages fine and some prompted us with errors. There were 2 .htaccess', one was in my admin (with different stuff in it) and the other in my htdocs.

I am afraid to block my customers, so I guess I will see if I can get some tech. support somewhere. Will let you know soon.

DigitalGiRl

[Brett_Tabke]

for example:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[digitalgirl]

I had the FP extensions removed, gosh I dislike FP! How on earth did that get there, no one knows!
Now my web host kindly helped me, but when I enter my friends IP he still can get in. Is there anyone out there open to testing? Please If so I was wondering if I could block a few of you wonderful people and see if actually works. Thanks

[digitalgirl]

I guess not. Ok, I will have to pay someone to get this done I guess. Thanks for all the help. ;)

[digitalgirl]

One more question, if I wanted to block let's say a certain city (not state), how would I do it?

Thanks for all the help ;)

[Xoc]

What do you mean by a city? Your ISP probably isn't in the same city as you are. Do you mean block the city where the customer's ISP is located, or the city where the customer is located. The first is potentially possible, but not easy. The second is impossible, because there is no way to tell. If you could block the city where the ISP is located, realize that many of your customers are coming from Dulles, VA, USA. That's where AOL is located.

To do a block on the city where the ISP is located, you'd have to do a whois lookup on each IP address that came in, then look at the city of the address, then block based off that. It probably would significantly slow down your web site to where it was unusable.