New Spider? bcentral.com

[ironman jakarta]

My spider trap just caught someone trying to download all my pics and wmvs. Hostname = Bcentral.com. Is this Microsoft?

IP address 216.75.194.** 
 has been blocked from accessing <snip> 
 because it called <snip> 
 on Sat Mar 19 20:42:29 2005. 
 The originating hostname is examplified.bcentral.com 
 and the agent making the call was: 
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; COM+ 1.0.2204).

Mike

[edited by: volatilegx at 3:17 am (utc) on Mar. 20, 2005]
[edit reason] removed some specifics [/edit]

[wilderness]

The following refernce from a March 2003 thread here:

216.75.194.54 - - [12/Mar/2003:06:14:39 -0800] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 0 "-" "GornKer Crawler"
end of quote

Sorry I didn't record the thread.

[ironman jakarta]

Thanks. Any idea what this bot is all about? I didn't sign up with any Microsoft service.

Mike

[wilderness]

Two links (via Jan's Collated Bot list [http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum11/2325.htm])

point to the MSN/Bcentral websites.
Those sites say they are "powered by superpages.com"

that gets a tool bar option, among other things.

[superpages.com...]

MS going through many changes and their SE tools an approaches have been quite unexplainable for some time.

The "standard" Verizon crawler has not honored robots.txt at my sites and as a result has been denied for a while.

Many times these issues are not black-and-white.

Only you are able to decide what's beneficial or detrimental to your sites.

BTW, I've had the range denied since the original thread in March 2003.

Don

[ironman jakarta]

Thanks Don. Well, any bot that doesn't identify themselves in the UA gets banned.

"You can take dat to da bank," - Baretta