Mark Schisler wrote on 1/1/2008 5:14 PM:
> Carl:
>
> This is becoming more and more prevalent as bots attempt to
> automatically gather information. Many sites I visit have implemented
> this feature. Let me play devil's advocate, if you were running the
> site and your servers were being overloaded what would your solution
> be? I agree what was implemented is the easy solution.
>
> My suggestion would be a filter to detect abnormal amounts of traffic
> from one IP address and block it. This is getting to be standard
> operating procedure for ISP's. The USPTO could spend a few dollars on
> such a software/hardware solution and add it to their network. Just a
> thought.
>
What you describe makes good sense. And indeed it is exactly what a
sophisticated webmaster will do. For example the Whois at
www.netsol.com does not have a human-being test. It simply looks for
large numbers of queries from a single IP address and gags the user
after a few queries.
Another option is simply to inject a five- or ten-second delay before
yielding the answer to the user's query, for every query after the
second or third query. This doesn't meaningfully impact human users,
who probably take five or ten seconds to hand-key the serial number
anyway. But it makes it impossible for the bot to vacuum up all the
data as it would take fifty years to get through all the serial numbers,
and by then all the data would have changed anyway.
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Received on Wed Jan 02 2008 - 01:33:02
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