Another baffling Smurfs™ product from Dollar Tree. Full disclosure: I didn’t buy this, nor have I used it. It doesn’t seem to be designed for use by a human (5 fingers per hand), or a Smurf (4 fingers per hand).

This is a little circuitous, as real life often is. My house has two fiber connections to The Internet. The ISP in question has failed to bill for them since July of 2026. We got a large lump sum bill for the connection that wasn’t paid for via ACH. We canceled it, because I’m retired now and no longer need a dedicated work connection.

October 19, 2026, a fortune cookie bonanza from the local Chinese/Thai restaurant! Four fortune cookies! Five fortune cookie wrappers!

In my post about Scraper Junkyard results, I proposed the existence of a centrally-controlled web crawler that made requests from Alibaba Cloud IP address ranges. After a closer look at the Apache combined format log files, I can confirm that at least one web crawler works out of Alibaba Cloud IP address space.

In my post about Scraper Junkyard results, I hypothesized a single, centrally-controlled web crawler that made requests from Rapid Seedbox Limited IP address ranges. After a closer look at the Apache combined format log files, I can confirm that at least one web crawler works out of Rapid Seedbox IP address space.

In my post about Scraper Junkyard results, I hypothesized a single, centrally-controlled web crawler that made requests from Contabo GmbH IP address ranges. After a closer look at the Apache combined format log files, I can confirm that at least one web crawler works out of Contabo IP address space.

For the first time ever, I used one of the weird screwdrivers that knock around at the bottom of your toolbox, or live at the back of your junk drawer.

I’ve had some new packets show up at my TFTP Honey pot.

Previous results

A pickup truck crashed into an electric pole just down the road yesterday. The pole fell partway over, held aloft by the power cables. The electrical mains power dropped abruptly. My Dell R530 and Qotom fanless server are powered through an uninterruptible power supply, but only the R530 has the USB connection and runs apcupsd to get notifications that the UPS is running out of energy.

Recently, I found On Bots, an interesting project from 2006-05-03. Someone constructed 2 billion numbered web pages, arranged as a binary search tree via hyperlinks. They tracked accesses of the web pages for a year. It looks like they were interested in how much of their binary trees got explored, and in what order more than anything else.

Contabo GmbH web crawler details

Rapid Seedbox Ltd web crawler details

Alibaba Cloud web crawler details