TalkTalk

badbad

[Pfui]

TalkTalk and its scanning bot have been discussed here* before, but it appears to be newly cloaking itself. (That, or I just caught on to it.) For example:

IPs:

89.242.96.191
89.242.100.205

UA:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.112 Safari/534.30

MORE (stupidly coded, log-spamming) UAs:

(TalkTalk Virus Alerts Scanning Engine)

(compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR ; http://www.talktalk.co.uk/products/virus-alerts/)

HuaweiSymantecSpider/[e-mail]+(compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR ; http://www.huaweisymantec.com/en/IRL/spider)

NOTES:

robots.txt? NO
Graphics? Externals? NO
403-Savvy? NO --

07/05 09:32:50/ 403
07/05 09:41:24/ 403
07/05 09:41:25/ 403
07/05 09:41:33/ 403
07/05 09:41:36/ 403
07/05 09:41:37/ 403

For more of its misbehaviors see:
Calling .js files directly [webmasterworld.com...]

FYI:

For your "centralised website blocking"**, tit-for-tat, convenience, the inetnum for the preceding "London TalkTalk Communications Limited" cloaked-UA+IP hits is --

89.241.0.0 - 89.243.255.255
(a.k.a.)
deny from 89.241.0.0/16
deny from 89.242.0.0/15

: )

*HuaweiSymantecSpider | Privacy, ethics [webmasterworld.com...]

**UK: TalkTalk To Offer Centralised Site Blocking [webmasterworld.com...]

[keyplyr]

Transcoder is Google's legacy process to reformat web pages to display better on mobile devices. It's still used on mobile appliances with older OS that cannot utilize the current process. As these older mobiles phones drop out of use, transcoder will no doubt disappear.

The reason many of us block it is that a transcoded web page is rendered non-functional for javascript, ajax, ads, site tracking, defensive scripts, etc.

Translators do the same thing and have long been exploited as a back-door entry for script injection, hacking and other nefarious ends.

[lucy24]

Yup, I got sneaky and looked up the Transcoder on A Different Search Engine, so I wouldn't be whammed with a bunch of g### propaganda. And then ended up at g### after all to see what they do to my site.

It's not just non-functional. Some of my pages become pretty well unreadable because of the way they handle floats and-- weirdly-- sentence-final single letters. (This happens a lot when you're writing on linguistic subjects.) And they essentially destroy the whole stylesheet, including things like centering that would work perfectly well at any size.

otoh while looking through logs I found, ahem, a remarkable number of WebmasterWorld folks using the Transcoder. Honestly, guys, aren't there better ways to hide? :-P

[lucy24]

To return to the original subject:*

TalkTalk Parental Controls were discussed here [webmasterworld.com] last year, but the thread's too old.

They're he-ere!

92.30.175.194 - - [22/Mar/2012:07:28:51 -0700] {human visit, provider: TalkTalk}
...
62.24.181.134 - - [22/Mar/2012:07:29:23 -0700] {robotic visit to page only}

62.24.181.128-143 (62.24.181.128/28) = TalkTalk parental controls

I make that 32 seconds for the kid to study my rat photos before the Parental Controls stepped in. Sigh.


* And that's not something you hear from me every day ;)