A penny for thoughts?

Last month AVG put out a new version of their anti-virus, version 8.0. It’s 8.0 that comes with LinkScanner and AVG LinkScanner is broken. It doesn’t handle base href properly and that’s why you’re seeing crazy urls with js/js/js/js/js/js in your access log.

Here’s a couple of (anonymized) examples from our own logs:
255.255.255.255 – - [20/Jun/2008:15:03:52 -0400] “GET /article/92572/js/js/gui.js HTTP/1.1″ 500 624 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;1813)”
255.255.255.255 – - [20/Jun/2008:15:03:33 -0400] “GET /article/77673/js/js/js/js/js//”"+sWOUrl+”/” HTTP/1.1″ 500 624 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;1813)”

I would like everyone to do like we did and redirect their User Agent so that AVG gets the message.

This is what we now have as our first htaccess rule:

AVG Linkscanner uses 1813 to identify itself so as long as they keep a unique identifier we can cut them off.

The problem is how aggressive the program is. From avg’s own forum:

You’d think a business that’s entire reason to exist is to stop maliciousness wouldn’t pretty much spam every site on the web and drive up their bandwidth costs like mad (and slow down google a lot).

I suggest you put that htaccess access rule if you don’t want to end up like this poor guy:

That comment was posted on this blog entry and it’s that blog article (actually, one of the comments) that first tipped me off. Everything else I found elsewhere just confirmed it. One of the best articles I’ve found is from TheRegister. It’s called AVG scanner blasts internet with fake traffic.

I figure if AVG wants to chew up other people’s bandwidth, they can chew up their own. I can’t seem to register on their forum and their technical support form requires a product license so while we’re at it might as well send them a message in case they actually monitor their access logs.

UPDATE: I’ve been contacted by AVG. They’re putting together a group to address the concerns of webmasters and asked me to be part of it. If you have any comments or suggestions on what they can do to improve LinkScanner let me know and I’ll pass it along once I get the group invite.

I learned a really cool trick recently. Don’t try this at home.

I think yesterday (and just this weekend in general) was one of my best days ever.

It started off rather uneventfully with a haircut. Then I headed off to the old port to check out the Eureka festival. It was an entire afternoon of science prevailing. I even got a plaque carved with a laser! At first I met up with Vijeta but Skrud, Kyle and Heather showed up a little later. After beating the heart (who’s in charge now, heart? You think you can flatline on me? I don’t think so) and lifting matter with my mind (I still think that one is bullshit.. I want an explanation!) we headed off to Chinatown for some food. Harley joined us at Pho Bang and I had a tasty dinner.

After dinner we headed back to the festival for the laser show. I guess I built it up too much in my mind (we were debating who would win in a fight between a laser and lightning since a storm seemed to be coming) and it was my only letdown of the day. We stuck around for a while amusing ourselves and we tried out the pedophile trap but got bored and managed to get out unarrested.

By now it was getting a bit late so Heather, Kyle and Vijeta headed home. Skrud, Harley and I headed up to the fringe park to wait for the 13th hour show. On the way though, I broke a flip flop. On St-Laurent. At 10:30 pm. Crap. So I ended up walking up and down a good part of St-Laurent on one flip-flop and one bare foot until Clare called and her brother had the great idea of using a shoelace to try and fix it somehow. So we found an open grocery store (after going by 2 closed pharmacies which is where we were actually trying to go) and I bought some shoelaces, MacGuyvered my flip flop and had a temporary walking implement. Science prevails!

We met up with Clare, her brother, Sean and Bridget at the 13th hour and it was amazing as usual, plenty of dance parties and lots of funny and entertaining acts. I’m definitely going to be seeing a lot of fringe stuff this week (next time is probably on thrustday) so if you’re interested in comedy or just an all-around good time give me a call or leave me a note and I’ll let you know what we’re up to in the near future.

The best fringe of them all, is the fringe in Montreal.
The fringe in Montreal, is the best fringe of them all.