Crawling Out of China

Ever since I was successfully crawled by Hollywood Interactive Inc, I’m starting to see hits from China which I haven’t gotten before.  They were going after my archived posts as well as directly accessing the PHP script responsible for posting blog comments.

I’m guessing after that one successful crawl, my blog is flagged as a spam target.  There’s a good chance I’m going to see an increase in spam attempts over the coming days.

CoreExpress Makes An Appearance!

In my previous blog article, I had mentioned that CoreExpress is actually another front for Hollywood Interactive Inc. and I had suggested that it would be prudent to block CoreExpress’ networks too.

There was another attempted full crawl on my site today and it was none other from— you guessed it!— the networks of CoreExpress!  It’s no coincidence that they’d suddenly show up to crawl my blog right after Hollywood Interactive Inc.

If you haven’t done so, ban ‘em both!

Hollywood Interactive, Inc. CIDR: 64.27.0.0/19

CoreExpress CIDR: 64.69.32.0/20

That ending wasn’t completely unexpected but I am a little disappointed that they really didn’t build things up towards the end with a concluding arc spanning the last three or four episodes.

It felt as if Cowboy Bebop was supposed to get a third season, then the studio was suddenly informed that the third season was scrubbed, so they had to wrap things up fast.

I felt unsatisfied with the way they resolved the issue of Julia.  She’d been given considerable weight with Spike’s flashbacks but the character’s resolution felt abrupt; a loose end that had to be tied up quickly and not neatly.

The direction of the final confrontation was uninspired, especially when the viewer was treated to some great combat in earlier episodes such as Spike’s fight with Pierrot Le Fou for instance.

The ending was a mixed bag for me and left me wanting.    Series creator Shinichiro Watanabe’s final say on the ending isn’t final at all as he’s leaving it up to the viewers to come up with their own conclusions.

Ambiguity seems to be a popular way of dealing with things in anime and manga and it’s freakin’ annoying!

Although I wasn’t completely satisfied with the ending, I did enjoy the ride with the dysfunctional Bebop crew while it lasted.  It’s a classic, to be sure.  Few anime series reach this caliber.

Now I’m off to dig up some vintage Faye Valentine hentai. ;-P

Yes, that’s right.  I’m probably one of the three anime viewers on the planet who hasn’t seen the Cowboy Bebop TV series.

Three days ago, I started a Bebop marathon and all the while I kept thinking, Why didn’t I watch this sooner?!

Now I dread the upcoming Cowboy Bebop live action movie being developed by Fox with Keanu “Neo” Reeves being tapped to star as lead character Spike Spiegel.

Read the rest of this entry »

According to commenters on the Damn Spamn blog, Hollywood Interactive Inc. is a shady company involved in spamming and illegal network activities.

One commenter had his company’s email spoofed by Hollywood Interactive spam so they got all the back-scatter from all the undelivered spam.

Another commenter said someone on the Hollywood Interactive network attempted to brute force access his server’s secure shell.

And someone discovered that Hollywood Interactive Inc set up another front company called CoreExpress with a new IP block, CIDR 64.69.32.0/20.

I checked the logs today and from the early morning hours on the 26th to 8:51pm the same day, Hollywood Interactive hammered my blog repeatedly every hour, trying to crawl all the content on it.

There’s been no activity from them this morning but who knows if they’ll try again.  I’ve added a second security plug-in that’ll hopefully nip this kind of hostile crawl in the bud.

If you haven’t done so, block their network.  Hollywood Interactive Inc’s CIDR is 64.27.0.0/19

It’d probably be prudent to block CoreExpress’s IP block as well.  CIDR is 64.69.32.0/20

I was about to write a post about how I think I might have gotten a handle on some crawlers and that my statistics are now more realistic when I checked my stats and found that some damned bot (IP: 64.27.28.34) from Hollywood Interactive, Inc. (CIDR:  64.27.0.0/19) crawled my entire blog.

585 hits in a single session, crawling everything from as far back as 2006.

Sufficed to say, my statis are skewed once again…

EDIT: As if 585 hits weren’t enough the first time, I just checked my error logs a few seconds ago and they’re still hitting my blog.