Deathpinging the Creepy Referrers
Like Halley Suitt I'm occassionally creeped out by some of the search terms that show up in my referrer logs.
Also like Halley, I use SiteMeter to track the tiny amount of traffic this blog attracts.
One of the things SiteMeter lets you do is drill down through the log to discern the first 24 bits of the 32-bit IP address at the other end of the search. You get the network part of the address and the first 8 bits of the host address - so you can usually tell the domain name the searcher was coming in from, but you wouldn't be able to identify their actual machine.
It's frustrating - you can almost, but not quite, see them sitting somewhere out there at the other end of the Net, typing in these bizarre and unsavoury searches.
So you can tell, for example, that the last creep to show up (horribly disappointed) at this blog searching for "preteen magazine" came in via a Google search from a PC running WinXP and IE6.0 somewhere in the Netherlands. And you can tell, from the front end of the IP address, that he's using Planet Internet as his ISP.
But you can't quite uniquely identify the creep with enough info to be able to flood his machine with deathpings. If only...
There's a feature SiteMeter ought to add - every time you get something nasty popping up in the referrer logs, you should just be able to click on the offending record to send a whole bunch of ping -f -s 65000s to shut the lowlife down.
Mwuuh hah hah harrrrr.
