Hello, your name is Bradley P. Allen Cormac Twomey. You are the registered owner of siderean.com an employee of Siderean Software. You are an Adelphia Cable customer with IP address 68.68.222.226. You are running Microsoft Windows XP with the .NET framework, are behind a firewall, and appear to have been infected with the JammerKillah remote administration tool long before you came to my attention.

You have been developing and testing some sort of program — first on your own computer, and later from patrick.siderean.com — which tries to serve up results by linking directly to my images on my server. Also, during the course of this development, you managed to suck down 218 megabytes of my personal photos in a matter of hours, using a Java-based crawler that does not respect robots.txt and that managed to evade all of my robot access controls.

Your website has been banned. Your IP address has been banned. Your crawler has been banned. You are not welcome here under any circumstances.

Have a nice day.

Update: both you and your boss have explained yourself and apologized. Your apology is accepted, but you are still banned. The matter is closed.

Update 2: I received another email from Cormac, asking for further edits to this post, and to lift the ban. This is my reply:

Cormac, I’ve updated the post to remove your boss’s information [I had previously posted information retrieved from his site's WHOIS record] and to reflect that I don’t really know what sort of program you were developing [I had previously suggested he was creating some sort of generic image crawler]. However, I’m not willing to edit any further. Everything in my post is a fact.

Your email address on your blog shows you work for Siderean Software. My logs show your IP address, and your browser’s User-Agent identifies you as running Windows XP. A cursory nmap scan of your IP address shows port 221 open, which is commonly associated with JammerKillah. (It also has other uses.)

Your custom script identified itself with the User-Agent “Java/1.4.1″. It recursively downloaded every one of my xref pages, and then every one of my photos. Of the 4666 times you hit my site yesterday, not once did you request /robots.txt.

My logs show multiple hits on individual images after that from a program you were running on localhost:9090, and later on patrick.siderean.com:8000, that look like this:

68.68.222.226 - - [17/Jun/2003:21:31:37 -0400] “GET /photos/ice_storm_december_2002/thumbs/PC050004.jpg HTTP/1.1″ 200 11607 “http://localhost:9090/test/test9query13.jsp?state=KqkBgA%3D%3D&dimension=subject&dimval=http%3A%2F%2Fdiveintomark.org%2Fphotos%23Forestcrest_Court&suggdisp=Forestcrest+Court&formaction=suggest” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)”

This is what led me to conclude that you were developing an image search program, using my site for testing purposes. Given the nature of Siderean Software, I further concluded that such development was for your own commercial gain. I am very relieved to hear that this is not the case.

Your IP ban will not be lifted. I auto-ban all abusive robots, an average of 2 per day. That this was a one-time scraping is not relevant; a one-time mailing is still spam, and a one-time crawling is still an abusive robot. The only reason my auto-ban script did not catch you is because you programmed your crawler with specific knowledge of my directory structure, and therefore managed to avoid my robot traps. Because of you, I feel the need to take my robot traps to the next level and track all image requests in real time.

I do not want any form of compensation from you. [This had been offered.] I do not want your data or your professional advice. I simply want you to leave me alone.

Thank you.

-Mark

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