Some guys in Japan wrote a script to scrape the site search page on the Node-RED website.
It would see that greed is a motivator for some people.
The problem was, they were hitting the site every 5 seconds and thus kicking anyone else on that page off. And that is not cool. (It’s also stupid as aircraft don’t fly that fast – 5 seconds will not make any difference to the data).
I have their IP address in the logs, but cant figure out how to turn that into a user or email, so I put a Tweet up and put a notice on the webpage, but after 12 hours they had not stopped, so I blocked the IP address using iptables in my router.
That was last week, I have unblocked them this week so will just wait and see.
As a result of this behavior, I reused some code that Terry wrote about 4 years ago to count aircraft messages and it now does some crude user tracking / website metrics.
Also as a result of the Tweet I sent, a few people have reached out to me and said I should consider shutting public access to the site.
In other words, put it behind a username/password.
I have mixed feelings about that. People can pass those creds around super easy, so it really won’t make any difference in the long run. It just would be a pain the butt for me in the short term as a bunch of people abuse me for locking them out.
Bottom line, I don’t see how putting it behind a user/pass will actually make any difference.
Got the software update done on the car, but have not yet done a full charge trip, so can’t comment about it.
Missed out on seeing the ellipse due to heavy overcast.
I continue to come into contact with people that just don’t want to put any effort into their question / job / task at hand.
One encounter this week set a new low bar, they basically asked me to read a webpage of instructions to them…. It seemed that them doing the reading was just too much work.
(Not sure how they were going to go putting the words into action – but I guess it was a mute point as they did not even want to read the words in the first place).
