Berserker Bing bots bring down Perl network Misfiring Microsoft search bots managed to render a site used by Perl Testers almost unusable last week. A post on the CPAN Testers' blog reports that its servers were being scanned by "20-30 bots every few seconds", resulting in what developers likened to a denial of service attack. The IP addresses of the bots - which failed …
I'm no fan of MS, but I have come across a few sensible people who work there (not at the top, no). I find it encouraging that someone at MS did bother to acknowledge and try to fix the issue (no idea how Google would deal with it either).
Secondly, assume ignorance before malice. All you need is a bug or a config mistake, so I'm not yet convinced this was an intentional DoS. Let he who is without fault throw the first MFM or RLL encoded hard disk..
That's what it must be like inside MS development offices. The company has a long track record of disorganization with no clear lines of authority, plus it has such a huge staff that (as it turns out, but not unexpectedly) a fair number of them aren't fully competent. They end up with some schmoe way down deep in the bowels of the outfit writing this bot without proper specifications, without proper testing, perhaps even unknown to his/her superiors.
Or to put it slightly differently, no one's in charge. Ballmer runs around frothing at the mouth, but that's not "being in charge".
With a corporate culture like that, with billions of lines of code that they have admitted they don't completely understand, with crap development software that does nothing to auto-block certain fundamental programming errors like array overflows, you can't help but wonder whether MS is really a bloated corpse of a company, gradually swelling in the hot sun from internal decomposition — it just hasn't exploded yet.
Why is there no icon for "dead animal bloating in the sun"?
F*ck me, I've been unable to access a Myspace account since November last year. Maybe it isn't the work of hackers after all, who have replaced the authentic log in panel with a false data stealing one. It is only Microsoft search robots looking for some decent free music, which are running amok and causing my DOS with the error message "Too many failed log in attempts using this eMail address".
Please someone bellow in the ear of the sys admins at MySpace, saying, "it's OK you can go back to sleep !" This DOS trick may have been in effect since 1996, according to Netcraft.
ALF
I experienced similar behavior of the bots on my server.
While the googlebots are almost unnoticable, the msn bots visit each page on the site like 10 times in a row, from different addresses sometimes, which makes me think that Microsoft failed at parallelizing the thingies; more bots visit the time at once, and the same page.
I was once considering banning those retards in .htaccess, but after a few hours it stopped, so I still allow them... but not for long, Microsoft, if it starts again.
This is very bad strategy in the long term, by the way, if they think that visiting a lot of times, and very often will help their search results or something. More and more people will get annoyed, and block the bots out of their sites, which will result in a massive fail of Bing (oh wait, that already happened, let's say very massive then).
"The behaviour of the bonkers Bing bots contrasted with the good manners of other search engine agents from the likes of Google"
The rantings of somebody who has never seen Yahoo's monster in the wild.
Plus a good server admin knows how to use IPTables (or better yet a hardware firewall) in anger - but then I guess these guys are Perl people so calling them good server admins may be a little premature...
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