•Re: State-of-the-art in Harvester Blocking

If you publish the information, they can download it. That's the first rule of the net.

If they must sign an AUP before downloading, you can terminate their access if they were discovered violating it.

If the information is clearly copyrighted, and they republish it, you can sue them, and maybe even get them nailed on criminal charges.

One technique for winning a court battle on that is to include a few "ringers" in the listings: a fake listing which looks like all the others, but doesn't derive from publicly available data. If you see a published list somewhere else that includes your ringer, there's your legal trigger.

The term "ringer" comes from phone lists that were leased in the old days: a few of the phone numbers "ring" into the list-owners inner office, so the owners knew how many times a list was being used, and by whom. Every public white page and yellow page book has a few ringers in it, for example, just so the phone book publishers can see who and how the data is reused. I know of a few corporate phone books that had a few ringers as well: a number listed in the book rang into corporate security instead, and was always summarily dealt with.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

Comment on •Re: State-of-the-art in Harvester Blocking

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Re: •Re: State-of-the-art in Harvester Blocking by zengargoyle (Deacon) on Nov 23, 2003 at 22:36 UTC
this works for network security as well. take some scattered IPs from a large range that have never been used, route them to a box with snort and block anybody who hits them. they are guaranteed to be randomly scanning your space and up to no good.	[reply]
Re^2: State-of-the-art in Harvester Blocking by Coruscate (Sexton) on Nov 23, 2003 at 19:48 UTC
I must say I like the idea of the ringer analogy. I do believe I've heard of it somewhere before, but it was obviously pushed to the extremes of my memory. Just wanted to say thanks for bringing that back into my mind. I'm sure it'll become a useful concept in some project of mine within the next few years or so :)	[reply]