This isn’t the first time the Panscient crawler bot has been caught ignoring robots.txt. There’s absolutely no reason for their bot to be hammering sites like this. None whatsoever. For now I’m going to let them be, but if they return I’ll add them to my blacklist.

More comment over here at Spam Whackers.

This week they’re touting a conference on Project Management and “building best practice and business excellence”. What is it with these conference idiots who think that spam could possibly be considered as ‘best practice’? Why would I or any sane business person do business with a firm like QAI that spams the people it wants to impress? And then, why would I want to commence doing business with a firm who won’t listen to a potential customer when they say, ‘remove me from your mailing list’?

What’s most annoying is their snide little quip at the end of their message:

“Since India has no anti-spamming law, we follow the US Bill, which states that mail cannot be considered spam if it contains contact information, which this mail does.”

Sure it does. They provide phone numbers for countries like India, Malaysia, Singapore and China. Then they also provide phone numbers within India for Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. It’s a run-on sentence, sure, but unfortunately it’s also misleading. The email message provides contact details, definitely, but you won’t be able to use them for anything useful (like unsubscribing from their ridiculous email barrage).

I’ve tried the unthinkable, of attempting to unsubscribe using their ‘unsubscribe here’ link, but of course this hasn’t helped. Their conferences@qaiglobal.com email address doesn’t seem to work in the slightest. It seems it doesn’t matter how many times I email them asking to be removed from their spam list, they don’t want me to go. So they keep sending me their junk about project management, best practices, and paying them significant amounts of money to go and hear them speak about such matters.

I just don’t get it.

I previously barred access to the site for small parts of the 124.115 block, thinking I had fixed the spam problem. However it turns out that the site is still receiving a large number of requests from IPs in this range, usually reporting an agent like Internet Explorer 6, and always declaring the referrer as http://nitrocandy.com and then, almost immediately afterwards,  http://www.nitrocandy.com.

I’m starting to think the whole block is rotten.

I spent some time looking around for who might be behind the 124.115 block, and it seems that at least part of the IP block is owned by a comment harvester. Another part of the block seems to be owned by a mail spammer.

Despite the large number of requests, part of the block may be legitimate. This blog post says that part of the IP block is reported by Sosospider. A disobedient spider, to be sure, but ostensibly above board.

For the moment, I’m barring the whole block.

Over the last few months, I’ve noticed a fairly odd pattern in my referrer listing. Every morning (my time), I seem to get a request that appears to originate from http://nitrocandy.com. Yesterday I decided to do something about it. I checked the extended logs and found that that particular request comes from a set of IP addresses beginning with 124.115.0.*. According to this post and, consistent with my own logs, this is a gateway (or similar) in China. I’m also not the only one who is a little upset about it. Bots Vs. Browsers tells me that at least one block of this IP range belongs to the Soso search engine, whose spider is presumably responsible for these hits. The rest of the IP block is also owned by Chinanet Shanxi province.

The problem is that the bot is insistent, doesn’t obey robots.txt, seems indiscriminant and, I think, doesn’t honestly report its referrer. So I’ve followed the lead on this site and blocked the following ranges:

220.181.61.
124.115.0.
208.36.144.
124.115.4.
220.181.32.26
58.61.164.
220.108.7.
220.181.
221.194.
202.108.7.

I realise this may block one or two legitimate readers but I can’t see any other way of doing it.

They have a section at the end of their article that mentions ’similar’ articles about the new Nissan GTR. I can only imagine that when they say ’similar’, it means they’ve stolen the content from those articles on the Nissan GTR also. They write “THIS ARTICLE WAS COMPILED BY IAB” but I know where they copied (STOLE) their material from.

I wrote mine almost a year before they wrote theirs. Plagiarism is such an ugly word, but that’s the only way I can describe it. I would have thought that a site like Indian Autos Blog that’s obviously trying to make a name for itself would have a go at writing their own material instead of plagiarising and stealing the content of another site. The people who run the Indian Auto Blog should think very carefully about what they’re doing.

Indian Auto Blog, you are nothing but thieves.

This approach looks like some sort of resort or other closely-held landing strip. Note the Cessna right next to the private home in the bottom left hand corner of the photograph.

This one must be a bit of a favorite for aircraft landing photographers, based on the sneaky photographer at the bottom of the photo. Our local airport does not allow photographers to get so close to the landing strip. The restricted zone extends quite some way beyond the end of the apron.

Again, I’m not sure of the location of this airport. It’s not Sydney, Australia I can tell that. But it sure looks like a crowded situation, with one taxi way and one main runway!
This is probably quite a legitimate airport but for some reason I’m strongly reminded of the drug baron’s private airstrip in the James Bond film, “Licence to Kill”. I can’t see much in the way of urban development beyond the trees, unless most of it is sitting below the treeline.

This airstrip is obviously designed by someone who enjoys computer games. Too far? Bad luck. Too short? Bad luck. Why place an airstrip right there? Who knows, but you absolutely MUST land your plane there or the entire world will suffer at the hands of millions of brain-eating zombies.

Note to self: make sure you land on a runway and not a highway.

Months ago, I bought the Battlefield 2 Complete Collection. What a deal! One game! Three ‘booster’ packs! 50% off! Here’s the game in question:

So you get Battlefield 2 Modern Combat, and you also get three expansion packs: the Special Forces booster pack, the Armored Fury booster pack, and the Euro Force booster pack. The reason I know this is because it says so on the box. I’ve never actually been able to play them. Periodically I click on something in the game and it tells me I need the Euro Forces Booster Pack to play this (”Click here to buy it now!”). Why can’t I play the games I’ve purchased?

This Electronic Arts purchase isn’t a one-off. Here are some other EA games I’ve bought in recent times.

See, I remember when you guys were cool. Remember Bard’s Tale? Remember Arctic Fox? Or that time when you blew everybody’s minds with Shadow of the Beast?

Back then I didn’t mind saving up my money to buy your games. And you were happy to fulfill your part of the bargain too. We both knew how it worked: I would bring in my money, and you guys would give me my game. You would go away and spend my cash making more games, and I would take my new game home until my parents told me to stop playing it and go to bed already.

But somewhere along the way, you guys stopped upholding your end of the deal. Somewhere, you guys decided that it was OK to take my money and not give me my game in return.But you’re way subtle about it. You still give me the box, you still give me the media, you still give me the stupid little advertisements for hats and sunglasses and EA-brand socks and what-not. But you won’t actually let me play the game itself.

So I get home and install the little darling. Battlefield 2 itself installs OK, but the booster packs? There’s a separate install for those. And it involves getting online to install them. Separately.

And so begins EA’s merry journey of annoyance.

To register, the manual instructs you to visit https://account.ea.com/commerce/bf2cc/code-entry.jsp. Everything looks fine and dandy when you visit that page. Here it is:

Notice how the site is still there, even though this support ticket on the EA website says the site doesn’t actually work. Still, you don’t know that the first time, so you do what it says and create an account in Battlefield 2.

This is Account Number One.

Once you’ve created the account, as instructed, you return to the page, enter your details and voila! Nothing happens. In fact, it gives you the same page again.At this point, let me state that I can, if I want, call the ’support hotline’. But the catch there is, EA, you want me to pay AU$3 a minute to call! With your track record on giving me what I paid for, I bet you’ll keep me on hold for fifteen minutes, then play me a recording saying, “in what it’s cost you to wait for fifteen minutes, you could have bought another game!”.

So the next option is to trawl the EA support base for clues. One support ticket advises you to go to this site and complete the instructions there. You can’t visit that site right now because it’s…er…down, but here’s the Google cache version. That site gives you eleven steps to activate your games (these are games you’ve already bought, mind you). In amongst those steps, it will direct you to another website (note: this website is not mentioned in the original EA support site).  But before you can enter your registration code, you’ll need to create an EA games account. I tell you this because the site itself won’t.

This is Account Number Two.

Once you’ve created this EA account, you receive the following email message:

Note: my ‘Friends at EA’ tell me I can sign into my account using my member name and password. But if you then do exactly as they say, and use your member name and password to sign in, you’ll see the following:

I ask you, who needs enemies when you have Friends at EA like this. Once you are able to get into the site, you can’t do anything without creating a persona account. Why? Who can say?

This is Account Number Three.

Time to send EA a support ticket through their Customer Support section. I and Electronic Arts use the term, ‘Customer Support’ loosely. This is not as easy as it sounds. Even if you’ve already logged into EA.com, you’ll now need to log in again. Note again: do I use my user name? My screen name? Well, my friend, if you try either of these, it won’t work. Oh no, you need to use your email address. But you won’t get an error, it’ll just show you this log in box again.

Now, EA is prepared to send you any number of spammy emails advertising their games, but none of these actually notify you of answers to the support questions you’ve submitted. Since signing up to submit my problem, I’ve received 13 emails. None of these include a solution to my problem.

Silently and without any notification (why not??) they’ve replied to the support ticket with this little gem:

Date of birth! Zip code! AH HA HA HA HA! Just to play a game I’ve already purchased? AH HA HA HA.

OK, EA, now how do I update the support ticket? You have a note telling the user they can just update the ticket (like you’d expect in the 21st century):

But there is no support for doing this if the EA support person thinks everything’s OK. So, I carefully started a new support ticket, including the original support ticket in my message. I ask them if they really, honestly need to know my date of birth just to let me play a game I’ve already bought. They reply with, among other things, “we have no other ways to identify the actual owner over the web”. Now, I posit that this is what the original media is for. If the original login credentials do not accurately inform you of who is logging in, then the login procedure is broken.

So, the moral of the story? Doubt I’ll buy any more EA games. I’m not the only one who is having these problems, and Electronic Arts just doesn’t care.

They even take Visa and MasterCard. The image linked to a site in China - it was a little bittersweet to add this sender to my blacklist, especially when they’re sending me such hip art! And for free too!