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.