The Daves Collective

Cyveillance
2003-11-23 00:51

So whats this traffic from 63.148.99.229 then? A quick Sam Spade and then Google dishes the poop - Cyveillance, a private snooping business in Arlington, Virginia (an interesting neighbourhood: CompTIA and dead hegemonist oppressors). Their bot goes looking for anything their corporate and government customers wouldn't like, whether that be filez, trademarks or freely held opinions. (Eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves.) Cyveillance are a seriously big operation. They have no reverse DNS and are proud of it. Their public statement about robots.txt is at odds with other peoples' observations and their bot deliberately conceals its own identity. Of course, as a free enterprise they are not publicly accountable. No surprise that they're in the homeland security racket. Their motto is "Minding your business on the Net", and indeed they are minding my business, whether I like it or not. Cyveillance say they "enable businesses to capture revenue by taking control of their brand identity, digital assets and corporate reputation online". Their customers should consider whether their own reputations are enhanced by being associated with, and should consider the value of intelligence received from, a company that behaves in such a manner. Related information:

• I've got a bone to pick with Cyveillance
• What to think about Cyveillance?
• How to block spambots, ban spybots, and tell unwanted robots to go to hell

A rich source of info about this is in the fora of Webmaster World. However, they are a tiny bit unpleasant themselves - the site throws a wobbly about abuse if you surf in on a deep link and disables Google cacheing of forum messages freely donated by other people. And for the paying punter they have "Private Forums" - to the Daves Collective those words denote a chain of sex shops and a long defunct dirty mag. Anyway, there is posted an interesting Perl CGI script which is supposed to sit somewhere excluded by robots.txt. As soon as Bertie Bot gropes Cecil CGI, Cecil plops Bertie's IP into a .htaccess deny list. Hah! but not really recommended, as a CGI script with write access to a .htaccess file is truly repugnant from the security angle. Anyway I'm too tight to pay for hosting with CGI.

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