More clues in the government botnet mystery

The plot thickens in the government botnet mystery I recently wrote about. This morning I got hits from the Navy-Marine Corps-Internet, specifically a host identified as gate3-norfolk.nmci.navy.mil:

Again, it started off innocently with a Google search, with the browser properly identified:

138.162.0.41 – – [15/Oct/2009:08:36:27 -0400] “GET /2008/12/19/beware-the-police-protective-fund/ HTTP/1.1” 200 6377 “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=police+protective+fund&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022)”

A few more hits down, I see the random jumping around I’d seen before:

138.162.0.41 – – [15/Oct/2009:08:36:30 -0400] “GET /2008/12/20/a-mange-in-a-wager/ HTTP/1.1” 200 4191 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”
138.162.0.42 – – [15/Oct/2009:08:36:30 -0400] “GET /2003/07/29/goodbye-bplog-hello-drupal/ HTTP/1.1” 200 14042 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”
138.162.0.44 – – [15/Oct/2009:08:36:30 -0400] “GET /2003/07/27/action-packed_weekend/ HTTP/1.1” 200 4371 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”
138.162.0.43 – – [15/Oct/2009:08:36:30 -0400] “GET /2003/07/24/keys_keys_keys/ HTTP/1.1” 200 5531 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”
138.162.0.45 – – [15/Oct/2009:08:36:31 -0400] “GET /2008/12/18/progress/feed/ HTTP/1.1” 200 1973 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”

My site is apparently being indexed by computers on a government-run network, but the question is exactly what is indexing it? Is this some sort of proxy technology that government gateways are now using, sampling websites that government users are viewing to ensure that these websites don’t have questionable content? Or, is this a botnet of compromised government computers as I recently suggested? Or (tinfoil hats, please), is this a secret spidering project run by a three-letter agency that uses the gateways of various government departments as cover?

The bottom line is these hits are inconsistent with a human browser. Beyond that I’m not sure what to make of them.

U.S. Government networks thoroughly penetrated

I saw this in my webserver logs today, from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Agency. Clearly it’s a botnet bot.

148.184.174.62 – – [13/Oct/2009:12:25:44 -0400] “GET /wp-content/themes/mtdotnet
/images/kubrickfooter.jpg HTTP/1.1” 200 2443 “http://www.markturner.net/2009/10/01/michael-jordans-net-worth/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30)”
148.184.174.62 – – [13/Oct/2009:12:25:44 -0400] “GET /2009/10/02/oculan-in-the-news/feed/ HTTP/1.1” 200 797 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”
148.184.174.62 – – [13/Oct/2009:12:25:44 -0400] “GET /2009/10/02/u2-yesterday-and-today/ HTTP/1.1” 200 6617 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”
148.184.174.62 – – [13/Oct/2009:12:25:44 -0400] “GET /2009/09/30/juggling-breakthrough/feed/ HTTP/1.1” 200 2083 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”
148.184.174.62 – – [13/Oct/2009:12:25:44 -0400] “GET /2009/09/30/netflixs-plan-to-take-over-the-world/ HTTP/1.1” 200 6419 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”
148.184.174.62 – – [13/Oct/2009:12:25:45 -0400] “GET /2009/10/02/u2-yesterday-and-today/feed/ HTTP/1.1” 200 1375 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”
148.184.174.62 – – [13/Oct/2009:12:25:45 -0400] “GET /2003/07/27/action-packed-weekend/feed/ HTTP/1.1” 200 1260 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”

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N&O still not web-savvy

So the News and Observer recently revamped their website yet again and I think I preferred the previous version. Seemed much cleaner to me, and also seemed to load faster.

One thing bit the N&O the last time they upgraded and they didn’t seem to learn the lesson because they made the same mistake again. They didn’t maintain links to their stories, a big webmaster no no! Any favorable ranking Google gave their stories just got shot all to hell because the web team failed to provide forwarding links from their old stories to the versions on their new site. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

And the newspaper industry wonders why it can’t seem to succeed on the Internet.

Back on the map, sort of

On a whim I checked my address again in Google Maps. After first having it in Google Maps, then finding it missing, I wasn’t sure whether when my neighborhood would “exist” again as far as Google was concerned. Looks like my submitting it to Google’s map company affiliate finally did the trick. It’s been exactly one year since I alerted them.

But all is not happy in Mapland, oh noooo. Seems that even though typing the address in will correctly highlight my house, the map itself shows my street as Bennett Street. It seems that Tonsler Drive exists enough in Googleland to pinpoint my house but the street name still doesn’t show up on the map view. And Street View is still broken, though it once worked.

I give up!

Simple pleasures

Kelly’s volunteering at Hallie’s school this morning, so I’m working from home and had to take charge of the kids. Both of them needed to be delivered to Conn so we walked down Edmund Street together. Before we were past our friend Randy’s house we saw our friends the Bettis following us, so we waited for Lorenzo, his mom Veronica, his brother Nicolo, and their dog to catch up. We picked up Oscar at his house, too, making us quite a gaggle!

I’d forgotten just how much fun it is to walk Hallie to school. Today’s walk was a bonus!

Weatherford auction

Yesterday we drove home from T’s soccer game to see signs for an auction at a neighborhood house. We stopped by to see what was going on and found the auction was at a home near ours that belonged to the late Rebecca Weatherford, who used to own the property our house was built on. The house’s items were being auctioned.

I was looking through the home when I recognized Dan Blue, who is handling the estate affairs. He told me some history of the place: that it used to be a dairy farm from the 1920s to the 1960s that encompassed about 70 acres. There was a plantation-style home that dated from the late 1800s but burned down long ago. My neighbor once told me he used to play on the majestic porch of the now long-gone home. I was fascinated to learn that such an old home was once nearby, and saddened that it no longer exists.
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Celestial sunrise show

Saturn, Mercury, and Venus at sunrise

On my Thursday morning walk through the neighborhood park, I saw a particularly spectacular sunrise. Three lights in the sky hung above the rising sun. I recognized Venus of course, but the two smaller lights were a mystery.

My copy of Stellarium told me today what they were: Saturn and Mercury! If you’re up at sunrise, you should take a look at this wonderful celestial show!

Crystal Ball

Crystal Ball (YouTube)
Keane

Who is the man I see
where I’m supposed to be?
I lost my heart, I buried it too deep
under the iron sea.

Oh, crystal ball, crystal ball,
Save us all, tell me life is beautiful,
Mirror, mirror on the wall.

Lines ever more unclear,
Not sure I’m even here,
The more I look the more I think that I’m
starting to disappear.
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LCROSS go bye bye

NASA’s LCROSS mission to the moon comes to a crashing halt around 7:35 AM ET this morning. You can watch it crash into the lunar pole on NASA TV.

Update 08:00: LCROSS is no more. I couldn’t see much of anything significant when it crashed. Also, I find it funny that NASA applauds this kind of moon landing: a crash! Hey, this is one NASA mission even I could be in charge of!