On Sunday, May 15, 2011 2:03:39 AM UTC+1, Brandon Wirtz wrote:
>
> And I noticed that SOME Company I won’t name, names…. Every Time they Run 
> an Ad on one of my pages they seem to think they need to send the AD bot, 
> and the Index Bot (twice) to the page, and they always do it with in 3 
> seconds of the page being requested, so my bill could be like 1/3 what it is 
> if this was fixed… Or maybe that’s the plan…. Are you guys in the GAE team 
> giving the Adsense and Search Teams a Kick back the more they hit my site?
>
>
> Somewhat OT perhaps, but the 2nd largest ISP in the UK has started 
implementing something that might seem dumb in so many ways (and many 
suggest is probably illegal) but they revisit EVERY unique non-HTTPS URL 
that any of their customers visit, duplicating at least all the query params 
and quite possibly the HTTP headers, typically about a minute after the 
original visit.

  http://www.talktalk.co.uk/products/virus-alerts/

They've been trialling this for a year or so, but seem to have turned it on 
for every customer (there is no opt out for customers) in the last week or 
so.

This could, of course, play havoc with your bills, not to mention the side 
effects of duplicate calls to REST type APIs - for example twitter.com 
always complains that I'm double posting messages now, and I was was testing 
out pubnub.com and it caused all the messages I published to be published 
twice until they (pubnub) quickly made some changes to fix this.

So if you see repeated traffic from a useragent "TalkTalk Virus Alerts 
Scanning Engine" or similar (at least they're using a different UserAgent) 
then that's what it is. It would SEEM that, having been lobbied and nagged, 
they have bowed to some pressure and are respecting robots.txt at this stage 
so that's a quick fix for now, but who's to say if they'll continue to do so 
in the future.

There are of course various forums debating the legality, motives, 
practicalities and intelligence of such a system, and I don't want to drag 
this forum into any of those avenues  (google for "StalkStalk" if you're 
interested), but just a friendly warning of something to watch for that 
could easily be doubling some of your bills for no good reason, and a quick 
and easy way to check for it and fix it.

--
T

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