Some fool at the Pentagon and some fool with the Secretary of Defense spidered my site relentlessly yesterday, downloading thousands of files. The spider pretends to be IE 5.5 on Windows 2000, but clearly is not, and grabs any image, audio file, or HTML file that it comes across, without any sort of bandwidth throttling to ease the load on my server. I’ve blocked each of their IP subnets.
When they get through again, as I’m sure they will, I offer this message: Knock it off. It’s rude.
It’s all part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to throw progressive activists in jail. It involves Donald Rumsfeld, the evil capitalists of the military-industrial complex, the CIA, the PATRIOT Act, Christian fundamentalists, Dick Cheney, and Halliburton. Oh, and probably also the blind acquiescence of Tony Blair. Vladmir Putin and Dominque de Villepin bravely tried to thwart the evil scheme, but failed.
Hans. You’re scaring me.
*grin*
Yeah if you wanted to stay off of A List somewhere, blocking the DoD subnets probably wasn’t the way to go about it.
Good luck with all that ; )
Well, it wasn’t me! I’m in Darmstadt, Germany right now. The music, food and beer are great, and the weather is a gorgeous Indian summer. Politics here are just as interesting as back home, though it’s just not as much fun making fun of Schroder as Kilgore. Still haven’t seen who’s finally going to be chancellor, but I think Schroder’s day is done, and Angela Merkel will eventually form a government.
Back on topic, tell DoD it’s illegal for them to do that. As of yet, DoD is still forbidden from undertaking any sort of domestic law enforcement function under the Posse Comitatus Act (the same one the Administration wants to kill), and there is at least one Execitive Order prohibiting Ddomestic sruveillance without a court order. On the other hand it very well could have been some moron wasting his time and your tax dollars entertaining himself on an overly long break. When it comes to DoD, my 32 years of military experience teach me that many times this sort of thing is better attributed to sloth and stupidity than to outright malice. If you could track the individual down (theoretically you can), I’m sure they’d try to cite the Patriot Act, but I’ll bet there’s a better than even chance this goober was just entertaining himself. And if he/she was on “official business,” then I’d bet the political nature of this blog gives you legal recourse to file a complaint, maybe even a criminal one — though I can’t imagine where to start or who would actually prosecute these guys.
Actually, the more I think about this, the more this pisses me off. DoD has better things to do than search private citizens’ files. I think they’re too lazy to go do real work, or possibly too unimaginative.
Prosit!
-Jim