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| 403 Forbidden |
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posted by Steve Jamieson on Wednesday, November 29, 2006 - 10:58 PM |
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If you tried visiting my site in the past 24 hours you probably received a 403 Forbidden error. Last night I was apparently on the receiving end of a ginormous referrer spam attack. What’s a referrer spam attack, you ask?
Here’s how it works. Whenever you attempt to visit a web page, your browser sends an HTTP request to the server, which specifies the file that you want as well as some other information about your browser and such. If you request a page by clicking on a link, the URL of the document containing that link is sent in the HTTP request. Web servers log these HTTP requests and then log analysis tools can generate statistical reports.
My stats have been publicly available (if you knew where to look), and one of the parts of the reports is top referrers, so I can see where traffic to my site is coming from. The addresses in the referrer report are live links, so when Google’s web crawler indexes my site, it sees these top referrers as sites that I have linked to, which increases their PageRank score. Therefore, if a devious individual can have a bunch of zombie computers make a bunch of bogus HTTP requests with the perpetrator’s site as the referrer, this nefarious person can get a link to their site on mine and thus increase their web site’s rank in Google searches (or perhaps more likely the weight that Google gives to their site when determining the rank of the pages that others may pay them to link to).
Continued...
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| Clones and Cigarettes |
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posted by Steve Jamieson on Monday, November 6, 2006 - 3:45 PM |
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During this election season, Missouri has become a hotbed of political wrangling. In addition to an extremely close U.S. senatorial race, two proposed amendments to the state constitution have stirred controversy and led to the expenditure of multiple tens of millions of dollars by special interest groups for advertising.
The most controversial amendment is the so called “Missouri Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative” (a.k.a Amendment 2). According to supporters, this amendment will ensure that Missouri citizens have access to any and all cures and treatments that are developed from stem cell research, ensure that Missouri medical and research institutions can pursue any stem cell research allowed by the federal government, and ban human cloning. Indeed, the fair ballot language that voters will be presented with paints nothing but a rosy picture of Amendment 2. However, as Amendment 2’s opponents correctly argue, this amendment is deceptive.
Continued...
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| Random Quote |
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| The LORD is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, LORD, have never forsaken those who seek you. | | ~ Psalms 9:9-10
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