|
|
Saturday 3rd July 2010
Hey! I know this place!
|
|
|
Sunday 4th July 2010
how bizarre is this?
| M**** went to the rightmove web-site and it was like "Sorry - your IP address has been blocked . . . suspicious behaviour," blah, blah, blah. I would ordinarily think nothing of this but then I was trying to do a bit of IRC and it was like "your IP has been banned," and I'm kinda thinking, "What's wrong with my IP address?!"
|
A rainy picnic
The mystery continues . . .
|
So, one of my PCs is part of the 'Tor' network. If you open up a command prompt and type in 'ping jonath.co.uk', you'll get my IP address. There are probably many other ways of doing this. My IP address is static, of course. So, what happens if you do a Google search for my IP address? This happens. A lot of pages. And here I am (or, at least, my IP address was listed at time of writing) - http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=tor - on a page listing blocked IP addresses. Hello?! What's going on here??!? Why is my IP address there? Is it because my PC is part of the Tor network? And, if so, are places like RightMove getting their information [of IP addresses to block] from this bizarre company hosted in the US?
|
|
|
|
Friday 9th July 2010
The mystery ends
So, anyway, not that anyone cares or anything but I've worked out why I couldn't get on RightMove. One of my PCs (the main one) is configured as a Tor relay. What's a Tor relay, I here thousands of people cry out . . . well, all is explained here. The technical people at RightMove don't like Tor relays, as is explained by Luke:
I have checked your IP address and it is a TOR node
(http://www.torproject.org/). We do not allow TOR nodes access to our site
as we have had so many cases of automatic data gathering by people, and they
are impossible to stop.
Your IP appears in the list from this request which is one of the external
IP's we use.
https://check.torproject.org/cgi-bin/TorBulkExitList.py?ip=213.161.94.30
However, as it turns out, RightMove have two other IPs that they like to protect. Hence, they also take advice from:
https://check.torproject.org/cgi-bin/TorBulkExitList.py?ip=80.64.55.62
and
https://check.torproject.org/cgi-bin/TorBulkExitList.py?ip=146.101.201.254
Now, as my IP address, 81.168.73.40, was listed in all three of these lists, I was banned from RightMove. How weird is that? So why are Tor relay's banned anyway? Luke? Well, it's apparently all to do with 'automatic data gathering':
"Automatic data gathering" is when someone uses CURL or wget to take just e.g. property details page data, no images, nor page framework. There is no usual pattern, but one type I see is to track price changes for a (sometimes huge) number of properties on a daily basis. This is not what our site is for, we are passionate about the quality of our data and the people we serve it to, so we have to protect ourselves from this abuse of our data.
So then I'm like, "Okay. Fair enough." So, I add this line to my Tor config file:
ExitPolicy reject 213.161.94.30:*,reject 80.64.55.62:*,reject 146.101.201.254:*
. . . and then restart Tor (thereby making the above changes come into effect) but then also set up two cron jobs to stop Tor at 9am and then restart at 11pm, every day (I was getting too much traffic and the bandwidth limits weren't sufficient). And to cut another story short, with the above changes made, I can now go to RightMove. Thanks, Luke!
|
|
|
|
Sunday 11th July 2010
It's no good; it's all nonsense.
    |     | |
So yeah . . . there's A****** with a sheet of sums, that he did unprompted, just for a laugh . . . or whatever reason, who knows? However, the full story involves A****** tapping away at that toy cash register (on the floor, now being played with by R******) and simply writing down the results of various calculations. Said cash register includes a basic calculator. But hey . . . we're working on his addition/subtraction and it's good that he would just sit down, play with a calculator and write down the results.
|
|
|
|
Thursday 15th July 2010
|
|
|
Saturday 17th July 2010
A******'s 5th birthday
|
|
|
Sunday 18th July 2010
A quick run around the Lakes Aquarium . . .
  
. . . with scant regard for the cost of entry, I hasten to add. Grrrrr. Children. Grrrrr. You're meant to saunter around and appreciate the freaking fish and turtles and monkeys and . . . stuff.
|
|
|
|
Monday 19th July 2010
So where's this Peter Pan thing?
So I had the day off today. R****** went to nursery, M**** went to work and I looked after A******. After lunch, we went for a wander around Williamson Park. A****** was aware of the Dukes doing a production of Peter Pan and he had it in his head (map in hand) that Peter Pan was 'somewhere' in the park. Hmmmm. Ah well.
|
|
|
|
Wednesday 21st July 2010
Hermitage Castle
       |        |        |        |        |    |      
. . . and then these six pictures above (to the left?!) were taken by Hilary. The filenames were rather long, and I didn't bother changing them (well, except for two troublesome ones), which kind of confused my web-site . . . but I think it's okay with it all. Oh . . . just noticed (as of 31st January 2024, a few years later): the 'previous' and 'next' buttons might not work too well with these images, owing to the non-standard filenames.
|
|
|
|
Thursday 22nd July 2010
An ominous warning . . .
Part of our elaborate childcare programme for the two boys over the summer period involved A****** being cared for by Pop and Cathie, over at Nanna-and-Grandpa-on-the-hill's house. Before A****** left, and initially unbeknownst to us, he left this message on his mega-sketcher thing.
|
|
|
|
Saturday 24th July 2010
A picnic somewhere in the Lakes
|
|
|
Sunday 25th July 2010
Somewhere near Leighton Hall, I imagine
|
|
|
Saturday 31st July 2010
I think we're somewhere near (or in) Silverdale
|
|
|
