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February 11, 2003
NameProtect - NPBot

[Update: More information about NPBot and Nameprotect]

Found a link to this cute little bot in my referer log: NameProtect Inc :: NPBot Notification

Interesting to see someone so openly telling people they are looking for "intellectual property violations". I wonder if they respect my copyright..

They say they identify with the NPBot user-agent string, which would make filtering out any attempts by the bot pretty easy, or even better - serving up content that did not in-fridge on any copyright if you are into giving away stolen goods. So what is the deal? Are they only looking for the regular Joe Schmo, stupid enough to just publish MP3's and other "goodies" on their homepages?


[Update]: A little more information about the NPBot's behaviour. It seems like Nameprotect isn't all that interested in playing "fair", and that they are lying when saying they respect the Robots.txt file. I am testing it myself to see if NPBot will actually accept not to spider this site. And I have added this to the robots.txt file:


User Agent: NPBot
Disallow: /

I am contemplating starting to disallow the IP-range of Nameprotects servers if it doesn't behave.

More interesting note about robots. I am seeing a LOT of traffic from a spider only identifying itself as "Robot", it seems to be very agressive, and are operating from a japanese server/machine (p1223-ipbf02hodogaya.kanagawa.ocn.ne.jp). Anyone else seen that kind of behaviour?

Posted by jarle at 04:16 AM | Comments (9)