A couple days ago, I wrote about Relevant Noise, who turn out to be a corporate intelligence and “brand protection” service much like Cyveillance, and whose unwelcomeness here got them blocked.

Today, I checked the logfiles, and noticed a reader had visited that page after querying a certain search engine for “cyveillance”. Huh. Interesting. Running Firefox under Windows XP, I figured they were probably a webmaster of some site somewhere, looking (as I occasionally do) for newly-discovered Cyveillance netblocks to block traffic from.

The IP address was 64.240.189.65; the reverse DNS is seriously broken, so right now the Gods only know if there’s a hostname associated with that IP. What we mere mortals can tell, though, is it’s probably a router or firewall, being right at the beginning of it’s netblock (64.240.189.64 – 64.240.189.127).
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I recently stumbled across a neat archive of military powerpoint presentations online. Many of them aren’t terribly interesting, unless you’re in the military, and the production values are almost universally bad (I haven’t seen clip art that bad in a decade). A word of advice to people making visual aids like these: typos reduce the impact of your presentation. Think about it.
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Back when I was ignorant about the finer points of wetshaving and associated paraphanalia, I accidentally bought a tube of Palmolive’s Lather shaving cream. What can I say, it was cheap. To compound my mistake, I didn’t read the instructions, and just assumed it was, you know, like every other shaving cream out there.

Um, no.
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Let’s face it, I’m a tech geek, and my job generates a bone-fide need for USB flash drives. Alas, I’m also a crypto, privacy, and security geek; in a few months, I’ll have been using Phil Zimmerman’s PGP for ten years. I’ve got encrypted flash drives, I’ve got flash drives protected with biometric fingerprint sensors…
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I’d always assumed from the name that relevantnoise.com was some kind of blogosphere search engine. Gods know they spidered this site often enough. So, under the impression they were meaningful and worthwhile, I put up with their unprofessional scraping that would have gotten most others blacklisted a while ago:

64.21.98.196 – – [da/te/2007:HH:MM:24 -0600] “GET /feed/ HTTP/1.1” 200 41843 “-” “-“
64.21.98.196 – – [29/Jan/2007:HH:MM:57 -0600] “GET /feed/ HTTP/1.1” 200 41843 “-” “http://www.relevantnoise.com; info@relevantnoise.com”

But it turns out they’re actually a corporate intelligence service, just like the much-loathed Cyveillance. So… Here, anyway, spying for big business, together with what is either incredibly bad software design or a paranoid approach to scraping content off the web (requests from the same IP, for the same feed, thirty-three seconds apart, one with and one without a user-agent? WTF?), gets you banned. The usual offending IP is 64.21.98.196; the relevant netblock is 64.21.98.192/27.

Thanks go to A Daily Rant for pointing out Relevant Noise’s irrelevance.