Girafa.com

[mark_roach]

Lots of my domains have just been visited by:

64.210.196.195 - - [25/Oct/2000:01:39:31 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 4043 "" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT)"

Seems to becoming from girafa.com

Does anyone know anything about girafa ?

[drbill]

Looks like they might be a new engine of sorts. No Info on them here.. Getting hit as well but not that much to take notice.

Someone needs to contact them about their DNS setups. as without the www. in their url it will not resolve..

[chiyo]

seems a bit rude to ask for your email address without giving any information about what they do apart from a giraffe skin!

[han solo]

That was funny!! Posting the ip into the browser location, and you get a black page with "nothing" at the top left corner...they must be about to provide a real professional service, if things are set up so very well...he he ;)

Thanks for the laugh.

Cheers!

[pnkpetls]

I've also experienced many supposed spidering incidents from Girafa.com. However, my Zone Alarm picked up their IP trying to access my computer. This was after I had hand submitted the URL of my site to Girafa.com because their search engine seemed interested. After reporting this attempted intrusion to Girafa, they requested my logs. Once looking at my logs, I noticed that these logs had been accessed and modified as noted by my explorer only 10 minutes before the tech person sent the email requesting them.. and you guessed it.. the entry for the intrusion by their IP was missing for that day. The person emailing me attempted to disquise their IP with another email program which not only did not work, but is the same IP that I also suspected as coming from the same source as the Girafa due to system, browser makeup and language used in their browser. All these things I discovered from the 3 different stat trackers I have installed on my site. Sure is funny that they seem to think spidering a site 10 times each day for two days straight is *normal*? I think not.

[Laisha]

>However, my Zone Alarm picked up their IP trying to access my computer.

I use Zone Alarm, too, and I often have search engines (HotBot does it often) apparently trying to access my computer. I dug into this at one point. From their FAQs [zonealarm.com]:

>Usually, when such an incoming request is made to your computer that comes from a web server you recently visited, it simply indicates that the connection to the server was not closed properly, or the remote server hasn't shut down the connection to your computer correctly.

[NFFC]

What laisha said, plus quite often it is the banner ads at "fault";

"If the source computer looks like a web server you've recently visited or from a web server that hosts advertising"

[Brett_Tabke]

Hotbot is still the only engine (other than ms) to run on microsoft products - nuff said.

[Girafa]

While I can ignore comments about my technical expertise, I cannot disregard allegations about my honesty.

I would like to make some things clear:
First, to stop being spidered by Girafa, submit a request to the 'delete URL' form in the Girafa.com site, or send e-mail to [e-mail].
Second, all IP addresses in use by Girafa are registered as such in the ARIN or RIPE databases. Tracing the spider to Girafa should not be much of a problem.
Third, neither I, nor anyone in Girafa has ever attempted to disguise our use of Girafa's IP space; I can understand how a combination of NAT and an internal mail server may look like such an attempt.

As to pnkpetls, all accesses from Girafa sites to pnkpetls site were attributed to Girafa's handling of penkpetls request to add their site to our database. I have not seen the missing log files, so I cannot comment on any access attempt in them. I wish pnkpetls would have contacted me regarding the alleged attempt to disguise my IP address before posting it here, as I believe it would have saved me some trouble, and them some embarassement. Pnkpetls declined my offer to remove their site from the database. In fact, in my correspondence with pnkpetls, I have learnt that pnkpetals welcomes the spider visits.

Yuval Yarom, CTO
Girafa.com

[Brett_Tabke]

Thank you Yuval. Now that both parties have had a opportunity to dicuss the matter, I think it best if both would take any further discussion of the matter into email.

I think you can see that posts like the above set off some red flags for us as forum administrators. We do our best at keeping up the free flow of information - I doubt you'll find a more open door policy in any forum on the net - however, we do insist that specific personal troubles with specific concerns should be worked out in private. We are not a vehicle for the resolution of personal disagreements or those persuing private crusades.

Thank you
Brett