[SC-Help] Re: Cyveillance abuse internet resources ?????????????

[Graeme Leith]

Tanya wrote:
> hi,
> i saw this on someone's sig file
> (to uncheck the box when reporting)
> is this a fact?
> thanks

That would be me. I even have a canned response for queries about my 
sig. ;-)

Cyveillance have a robot that trawls through web sites looking for 
stolen intellectual property. The robot ignores the robots.txt exclusion 
protocol, originates from IP addresses that don't reverse lookup to 
Cyveillance and tries to look like an ordinary user by spoofing its user 
agent.

The robots.txt (defacto) standard is used amongst other purposes to stop 
robots getting stuck in dynamic pages and to stop robots generating 
costs for people who pay for their web services by the amount of data 
they transfer. By ignoring it, Cyveillance are seeking to make a profit 
by exploiting resources that other people pay for, much like spammers 
do. Cyveillance could avoid abusing peoples servers by sending people to 
look at pages that robots are banned from. Of course this would increase 
their costs, just like spammers costs would increase by using ethical 
mailing practices. Cyveillance, like spammers, choose to ignore peoples 
wishes in order to make their money.

If you run a web site, you may want to grep your logs for visits from 
63.148.99.224/27 & 65.118.41.192/27. You may also want to firewall those 
addresses if you find that they have been abusing your resources for 
their profit.

If you look back to the June and July 2003 archives for the main SpamCop 
newsgroup, you'll see quite a bit of discussion on the matter.

Specific responses from Julian & Cyveillance:
http://news.spamcop.net/pipermail/spamcop-list/2003-June/044984.html
http://news.spamcop.net/pipermail/spamcop-list/2003-June/045279.html

General archive:
http://news.spamcop.net/pipermail/spamcop-list/

There are more ethical companies that perform the same service, such as 
NameProtect, who identify their bot and obey the robots.txt protocol. 
Their robot is perfectly welcome on my sites. Cyveillance are firewalled 
whenever I find them.

Julian (as is his right) has decided that Cyveillance are a good thing. 
Quite a few people think otherwise and there is no warning on the 
SpamCop site as to the abuses Cyveillance get up to. So I just leave the 
sig there in an attempt to warn any newbies who drop by the newsgroups.


-- 
Evidence shows Cyveillance abuse internet resources.
I recommend unchecking their box in SpamCop reports.
Cyveillance are part of the problem.
They are not part of the solution.