10 Dec. 2007
Dear Lightspeed employee,
May I recommend that if you are going to visit my site discussing your offensive business practices, you do not do it by clicking a link from your office webmail program, which appears in my server logs as
Referer: http://mail.lightspeedsystems.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp
7 Dec. 2007
Way back when I was keeping the Internet Destruct blog, I posted about an Internet filtering company that supplied schools with filtering software for their machines, and I mentioned that I had an .htaccess entry blocking them from indexing my site, mainly because I find it unconscionable and completely un-American (yeah, that's right, I do actually have that word in my repertoire, flaming faux liberal though I am) that a company makes money by censoring stuff in libraries and schools, the very bastions of learning and knowledge.
Needless to say, given the above I was extremely pissed when I discovered about 15 minutes ago that my site is currently in their database and appeared to have been downloaded in late November.
So I went back through my recent logs with a fine toothed comb and finally found out how they were accessing the site. It helped that they mention on their site when they last downloaded my files, although I stupidly forgot that my server is somewhere ridiculous and I didn't time zone correct. At any rate, they have a new domain name to send their spiders out from - biz.arrival.net. A whois search on lightspeedsystems.com (their last bot address) and arrival.net shows the same contact address.
This is a rather insidious development, because Lightspeed either offers or receives their own ISP services through Arrival Communications, which means blocking that hostname could potentially block real users who happen to use Arrival for connecting to the Internet.
Sigh. I might have to actually start creating fake content just for them.
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} arrival.net$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]