I’ve just discovered the Goolag Scanner.
It’s a handy dandy tool for using Google queries to identify if there are any known holes in a website. Googlebot has already checked every crevice in the site, I just want to know what it knows!
Now Google, being all security conscious and that, gets a bit sensitive about you running these queries. They know that it’s possible you’re going to use the results to do bad things.
I check the whois records for domains reasonably often. Whoisguard type systems are commonly in place to protect the identity of the domain owner. No problems there.
What irks, though, is the people who give completely false information… like this one where the info is incomplete and gives an Australian address yet I know that the actual owner is in India. By saying he’s in Melbourne he aquires a western credibility he perceives as superior to his Indian identity.
This is a big topic in Auckland right now as our City Council Elections are hijacked by a supposed candidate promoting his porn empire. It’s hard to separate the “no harm done” side of the industry from the exploitive and damaging side and to understand, in the long run, where to draw the line.
Aside from the obvious industry fronts of websites, movies, magazines and gadgets there are the rogues that exploit the demand for the product. I guess anytime you have something popular there are going to be people who trick and connive.
Take Captcha – it’s a great way to bot proof your website and unless
This is a hot topic at DigitalPoint right now as there is a bot working it’s way down the memberslist and doing bruteforce or dictionary attacks on the logins. Because the forum uses vBulletin it only gets 5 shots before there’s a lockout and it has to move onto the next member and then remember to return later. But it’s keen and has been running for a couple of days now. Reports indicate that it’s tried some other forums too.
Why?
I’ve just taken a novel step and am trying out two directory submission services. They’ve both taken a while to get started and yesterday I received a flood of submission notifications. Yay!
Buried within them though were some requiring a second step – click this link to confirm your submission.
Now there’s a misleading title but I had cause to ask a Mambo site to output some info without a template. Sadly it didn’t want to do that – although if you know another method, please leave a comment…
The official method is to call www.mysite.com/index2.php but that still parses the page and adds an alternate stylesheet and header information. It’s good, but not perfect.