Slashdot has the news of how spammers-in-disguise AVG's anti-virus software is "protecting" its users by prefetching the URLs found in each page. Mainly, they're exponentially increasing the bandwidth required to navigate the Web, and incrementally increasing the bandwidth costs of servers. The thread is a good read, as it provides several methods of detecting and handling HTTP requests from these miscreants. However, I fear the only thing that will actually stop these guys is to throw them in jail on an interference charge, and/or successfully follow a class-action suit to recover bandwidth costs. As for my little corner of the world, I was wondering where all these random hits were coming from. I thought it was just some form of malware, but now that I know this is look-ahead malware, there's a silver lining at hand. I can assume (with 90% confidence) that the hits from this malware are search-engine based (the referer text is blank, so I have no real indication); so the vast majority of this traffic is from search engine hits. By filtering out those malware hits that were followed by legitimate traffic, I have a measure of unfollowed search engine queries. This extra dimension of navigation is interesting, and it reeks of the evil that is Advertising/Marketing. With this agent, AVG can provide a summary of search results not followed, providing the hookers-and-blow set a previously invisible metric. The criminals have at least a secondary motive for gumming up the pipes. |
| posted at: 21:57 | permanent link to this entry |
Today's topic for discussion is:
| Low Country Boil. |
| posted at: 01:13 | permanent link to this entry |