The scholar, focusing on the mathematics, admonishes the "pragmatic
idealist":
>> That is not a problem. That is an algorithm whose first step is not even
clear:
>> a Google search on {stats "view all sites"} returns a "normal response", a
list of 224,000 pages from different websites.
OK: ["usage statistics" "view all sites"] returns nearly 100% viable results.
Open them one at a time; change the URL from
".../stats/usage_201904.html" to ".../stats/site_201906.html" from which the
first and last columns should be selected and
saved as a two-column table.
We've developed this to a stage at which one could probably repeat the
exercise as soon as each month's data becomes
available ... makes a good homework problem. Getting all the IPv4 addresses
makes it a dissertation.
Here's another stab at stating the problem:
Too many visitors to our Internet domains are up to no good, as evidenced by
the many unresolvable hostnames appearing in
the lists of Recent Visitors that we find in our own domains' logs. Internet
traffic is identified by a numerical protocol,
either IPv4 (currently) or IPv6 (future, to gain more address space). Our
ISP's gratuitously allow these numerical adddreses
to be translated into visually more easily recalled hostnames. Unfortunately,
operators of Internet servers are allowed to
assign arbitrary names to each numerical address in the server's address
space, known as "pointers" a.k.a. PTR's. Each server
address can host any number of subdomains, whose names must be registered;
these are known as A records. Sadly, during the
process of transmitting information on the Internet, expedient nameservers
are used to cache repeatedly accessed requests
for the IP addresses of hostnames and thereby accumulate both A records and
PTR records which are treated equivalently. If
a PTR is named the same as more than one other PTR, the A records at either
one's IP address become unresolvable unless one
knows the IP address of its official nameserver. Therefore,we can protect our
own Internet domains by blocking all the
offending IP addresses that we can identify from the repetitive status of the
hostnames that appear to be most
indiscriminately accessing similar domains to our own.
