[vox] [fwd] Is the MSN search engine being used in the battle to kill Linux?

[Shwaine]

On Wed, 29 Sep 2004, Bill Kendrick wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 29, 2004 at 11:47:15AM -0700, Jeff Newmiller wrote:
>>> In this article, I discuss the issue. I will also post the fix we
>>> discovered by accident. BTW, a standard redirect will not work.
>>
>> Oh, really? Inquiring minds want to know more.  Would, perhaps, an
>> appropriately-designed firewall rule do the trick?
>
> Yeah, when I finally read to the end of the article, I didn't really
> notice the aforemention solution.  The article kinda dwindled down.
> (Sorry for not looking more closely before posting it here!)
>

I didn't see the solution either. The article did seem to be rather 
disjoint and wandering. More like a quickly written blog than an article 
really.

What I have to wonder is if those quickly mentioned people getting 
bandwidth issues from the bot have a legal redress in small claims court. 
Should be relatively simple to show that robots.txt is the community 
standard for limiting automated crawling of one's website and that this 
MSNBot is ignoring said file via access logs. Then all that remains is to 
show that said violation of one's wishes caused one to exceed the 
allocated monthly bandwidth (again, access logs should provide this), 
either costing one x dollars in overage charges or disrupting one's 
website for x days which could be translated into a lost revenue amount. 
The dollar amount would probably be under the small claims court limit and 
it is not too expensive to bring a case there. Then all that remains is to 
publicize the heck out of any victories in small claims court.