Since I acquired this domain last April, my referral logs have listed a steady trickle of referrals from the International Atomic Energy Agency: 53 last year and 11 so far this year. There were 6 just yesterday. I wonder what that's all about.
Posted by Dr. Weevil at January 26, 2003 02:04 PMOnly 11? I've gotten 663 hits from them so far this year.
Dec. - 99
Before that, I was getting 2-5 hits a month from them.
Not sure where they're coming from; my server logs attribute them to the root directory.
Me too. Ten in the last two weeks.
Posted by: Aaron Haspel on January 26, 2003 10:41 PMI get hits from them all the time. I think it's a spider that crawls through weblogs looking for references to Scott Ritter.
Then they take our jokes as their own.
Posted by: michele on January 27, 2003 08:55 AMYes, a few days after I copied the entire Sound and Fury archives to the new Movable Type site, I noticed that the IAEA's script was attempting to download the posts from last April one at a time. The amusing thing was that it appeared to be hitting a monthly archive page, loading the same page again and again and again but with a different NAME anchor each time (i.e., 2002_04.html#001715, 2002_04.html#001716, 2002_04.html#001717, and so on for tens of reloads...)
Posted by: Combustible Boy on January 27, 2003 10:53 AMSame here. You can see them show up on the LGF referrer page from time to time. I agree that it looks like a spider of some kind, maybe for an intranet search engine.
Posted by: Charles on January 27, 2003 01:13 PMYeah. I always wondered what the hell their problem was.
I say we band together and ban the IAEA spiders. ;-)
Posted by: Meryl Yourish on January 27, 2003 09:48 PMThe IAEA has an "Open Source Collection Unit" which includes a series of automated data collection systems. The idea is that info indicative of proliferation might leak into the public domain, but to find such info they basically have to check pretty well everything - and I do mean everything. Every newspaper, magazine, journal, newsletter etc. they can get access to, all the way down to web pages (following links mechanistically). People couldn't do it - the process has to be automated.
It is not evil or sinister (though it might be argued that it is a bit stupid).
Posted by: Russell on January 29, 2003 06:46 PMDoc, you fool. Don't you realize that radioactive weevils are one of the early signs of illegal atomic weapons testing? :)
Posted by: CGeib on January 31, 2003 06:14 PM