larbin

bringing up an old topic

[Big_Balou]

Over the last couple of months I've been visited by :

66.28.68.236 Url: /myurl/index.html Http Code : 200
Date: Jul 31 18:55:24 Http Version: HTTP/1.0 Size in Bytes: xxx
Referer: - Agent: larbin [e-mail] .

I did a site search and found a few mentions of bigfoot but nothing definite and their site doesn't give you any more sense their web search function looks like its by overture.

I did a reverse dns and got this:

Cogent Communications (NETBLK-COGENT-NB-0000)
1015 31st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20007
US

Netname: COGENT-NB-0000
Netblock: 66.28.0.0 - 66.28.255.255
Maintainer: COGC

From the old thread it seems that metacarta, which is the result of the trace route, was supposed to be getting a Gov't contract from the FBI.

Does anyone know anymore about this now ? Or why they should be spidering a site that doesn't have any political content ?

<note> I may have posted in the wrong forum if so please move to the correct one...thanks</note>

[misosoph]

I sent an e-mail to [e-mail]. It bounced:

The following address(es) failed:
[e-mail]:
(generated from [e-mail])

Then I wrote to [e-mail] about their robot and its e-mail contact, and I got this reply (from the site's administrator, as the domain name's WhoIs shows):

Sorry it was hard to get the message to us --- we're fixing that.

We gather geographic information off web pages and index it so you can search using a map. The index is not publicly accessible today but probably will be someday. We would appreciate access to your content, because it helps us tune our machine learning system, but I understand if the load on your servers is too much.

Whenever I have found "larbin ([e-mail])" in my access logs, it has always begun by requesting the robots.txt and never taken more than a few files timed well apart.

Metacarta.com is indeed hosted by Cogent Communications (ns1.metacarta.com = 66.28.23.141).

Those who want to see something sinister in all this are welcome to. I haven't the imagination.

[Everyman]

It doesn't take all that much imagination.

From the New York Times [nytimes.com] last Jaunary:

MetaCarta, which has 12 employees, has done a whirlwind tour of the C.I.A., the Army, the Air Force, the National Security Agency and In-Q-Tel the last several weeks. The company makes a program that can associate documents with geographic sites.

From the Metacarta web site: They are looking for a senior sales engineer for pre/post government sales, to be based in the DC area. Requirements include a TS/SCI (Top Secret / Secret Compartmented Information) clearance and background in the IC (intelligence community) and DoD (Department of Defense).

[volatilegx]

Wow.

I wonder what would happen if you got caught cloaking to these guys? Maybe a couple of special agents at your door with a search warrant (or without a search warrant in these times).

[misosoph]

That's nothing compared to what the advertises in the Times will do when they discover that you gave false data when you registered online!

Gathering information and trying to structure it in a way that is useful to them is what the so-called intelligence agencies do. To help them with this they hire many businesses and organizations (universities). Metacarta is just one more of these.

In any case, the search engine spider "larbin ([e-mail])" has been identified. You can always list it in your .htacess file is if it looks like a bad bot to you.

[Big_Balou]

Misosoph,

I also sent an e-mail that bounced. Stuff like that makes me wary of anybody. Why have a spider with a user agent that gives an e-mail that doesn't exist or is forwarded to a junk (free) account ?

With that said I'm not a conspiracy kind of person but things are heating up. I'm just wondering how far it will go.

Definitely considering a ban on them at the door.

[jdMorgan]

I've got larbin blocked in .htaccess. I have had precisely one incident over the past three years
where I blocked a legitimate "user" because of it - a university research project - and I now allow
them in as a special case.

Larbin is a red alert for trouble in my book...

Jim