From Newsgroup: comp.lang.ada

On Wed, 11 Sep 2024 23:57:33 -0500, Randy Brukardt wrote:

"Lawrence D'Oliveiro" <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote in message news:vbimad$1j26j$6@dont-email.me...

Don't you wonder why people insist on returning "403
Forbidden" for those using a command-line tool like wget?

Most SEO tools and other
useless/criminal scrapers like to fake their identification, and WGet is
a favorite for that task. There are many owners that block that and many other abused user-agents.

That doesn’t make any sense, because anybody who knows how to use wget
would know about its “--user-agent” option. So if they really were using wget to conduct their site abuse, you wouldn’t know, and blocking wget’s default user-agent setting wouldn’t help.

(The Ada-Auth.org blocks about 20 user-agents, but not WGet.

Which kind of proves my point.
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.ada

On 13 Sep 2024, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote
(in article <vbvpta$esm6$8@dont-email.me>):

On Wed, 11 Sep 2024 23:57:33 -0500, Randy Brukardt wrote:

"Lawrence D'Oliveiro"<ldo@nz.invalid> wrote in message news:vbimad$1j26j$6@dont-email.me...

Don't you wonder why people insist on returning "403
Forbidden" for those using a command-line tool like wget?

Most SEO tools and other
useless/criminal scrapers like to fake their identification, and WGet is
a favorite for that task. There are many owners that block that and many other abused user-agents.

That doesn�t make any sense, because anybody who knows how to use wget
would know about its "--user-agent" option. So if they really were using
wget to conduct their site abuse, you wouldn�t know, and blocking wget�s default user-agent setting wouldn�t help.

Wrong.
--
Bill Findlay

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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.ada

On 9/12/24 19:17, Bill Findlay wrote:

---

Wrong.

Why is this wrong?
--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.114

From Newsgroup: comp.lang.ada

geodandw <geodandw@gmail.com> writes:

Why is this wrong?

I run into sites all the time that block the wget user agent, but that I
can retrieve with curl.
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.ada

On Thu, 12 Sep 2024 19:16:50 -0700, Paul Rubin wrote:

I run into sites all the time that block the wget user agent, but that I
can retrieve with curl.

And I run into sites all the time that block the default wget user agent,
but that I can retrieve with wget.
--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.114

From Newsgroup: comp.lang.ada

"Lawrence D'Oliveiro" <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote in message news:vc091i$ljiq$2@dont-email.me...

On Thu, 12 Sep 2024 19:16:50 -0700, Paul Rubin wrote:

I run into sites all the time that block the wget user agent, but that I
can retrieve with curl.

And I run into sites all the time that block the default wget user agent,
but that I can retrieve with wget.

You're confused. The attackers aren't using Wget, but they are *claiming* to be WGet. As you point out, real WGet users tend to claim to be other things. So blocking WGet would be more likely to block the attackers than real
users. (As you state, real users know how to get around the blocks, so the inconvinience for them is minor. Usually, the attackers don't change their attacks often, there's plenty of sites that don't protect themselves at all. So they are more effective against attackers.)

And anyone that thinks that ad revenue is important is probably blocking all grabbers, and probably throttling everything else so that grabbing multiple pages is very slow (at human reading speeds). (At least 90% of the browser hits I see are obviously fake, and if I cared enough I would block all of
them - it would just take a bit of programming to check if the behavior is similar to that of a live human. But I only block when something is causing performance problems, and generally by IP.)

Randy.


Randy.


--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.114

From Newsgroup: comp.lang.ada

On Sat, 14 Sep 2024 01:27:22 -0500, Randy Brukardt wrote:

"Lawrence D'Oliveiro" <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote in message news:vc091i$ljiq$2@dont-email.me...

On Thu, 12 Sep 2024 19:16:50 -0700, Paul Rubin wrote:

I run into sites all the time that block the wget user agent, but that
I can retrieve with curl.

And I run into sites all the time that block the default wget user
agent, but that I can retrieve with wget.

You're confused. The attackers aren't using Wget, but they are
*claiming* to be WGet.

But that long list of user agents being blocked that you previously
mentioned did not include wget.
--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.114

From Newsgroup: comp.lang.ada

"Lawrence D'Oliveiro" <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote in message news:vc3di3$1bmhk$3@dont-email.me...

On Sat, 14 Sep 2024 01:27:22 -0500, Randy Brukardt wrote:

...

You're confused. The attackers aren't using Wget, but they are
*claiming* to be WGet.

But that long list of user agents being blocked that you previously
mentioned did not include wget.

I don't block WGet myself, I haven't seen enough abuse. There's more from
Meta and Amazon, and I probably shouldn't block them, either. (Meta and
Amazon both have crawlers that ignore requests for throttling, I know some webmasters block them for that reason.)

But I'm sure that other webmasters have different experiences. I don't find
it surprising when anything is blocked anymore (although blocking Firefox seems a bit much).

Randy.


--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.114