LightSpeedSystems

Why Spoof?

[TheMadScientist]

I don't get the whole spoofing garbage.

When you hit all 4 pages on a small site I have in < 2 seconds I don't think you can surf this particular site that fast as a real person, so I wonder a bit and do silly stuff like run a lookup on the IP... What do I find?

LightSpeedSystems a company that looks like they're on the up and up, doing a good thing spoofing their UA like they're running IE 7.

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0;Windows NT 5.1;.NET CLR 1.1.4322;.NET CLR 2.0.50727;.NET CLR 3.0.04506.30)

We're doing a good thing for kids, we don't follow the rules ourselves, but don't worry about us, what we're doing is a good thing so don't mind us spoofing our UA...

Yeah, maybe there's a good reason, but I get tired of the spoofing garbage.
As a site owner it just plain gets old... Haven't decided if LightSpeedSystems is getting blocked or not yet, but I really think so.

Spoofing is one of the few reasons I block bots...

[wilderness]

Lightspeed caters to content filter for k-12 schools, however they certainly had a dubious beginning ;)

66.17.15.zzz - - [28/Mar/2005:20:01:56 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 206 9503 "-"
"Schmozilla/v9.14 Platinum"

Over the years I've not found their page requests to overwhelming, and even though (at times) I've questioned (rhetorical) the logic of their activity.

[TheMadScientist]

Yeah, the page requests weren't bad it's just the spoofing that gets me...

The other day I had I curl UA in my logs ... I really thought I had everything generic like that blocked, because it doesn't usually come with a page about what they're doing when it's only the 'out of the box' curl UA, but they at least didn't pretend like they were IE and hide the fact they were downloading (or doing something) with the pages they visited, so I didn't block 'em.

I really got tired of blocking constantly a few years ago, so generally if they tell me who they are, what site they're from and give me an idea of what they're doing with the info I'll let 'em have at it, but I keep custom stats and when an IE UA shows up and I think a bot is a 'real visit' then I have a look to see what they visited and try to get an idea of how things went only to find out it's a bot, they just wasted my time because they didn't just follow the stinking standards and tell me who they are and what they're really doing, so I generally bust open the .htaccess and block 'em so I don't waste my time on them again.