Re: "Red" And The DoD Language Competition

"Lawrence D'Oliveiro" <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote in message
news:vbimad$1j26j$6@dont-email.me...
...

Hey, terrific. Don't you wonder why people insist on returning "403
Forbidden" for those using a command-line tool like wget?

No (as the operator of a web site). Most SEO tools and other
useless/criminal scrapers like to fake their identification, and WGet is a
favorite for that task. There are many owners that block that and many other
abused user-agents. (The Ada-Auth.org blocks about 20 user-agents, but not
WGet. See https://support.tigertech.net/error-blocked-user-agents for a
better explanation than I can give as to why. I don't block all of these
agents, but I do throttle some of them and block their access to parts of
the site.)

Additionally, some sites want to provide access to their documents, but not
really to allow people to copy them (in order to get advertising revenue
from reading them). I know the owners of the Red specification are in this
category, as I offered to host a copy in the AdaIC archives, and they turned
that down.

             Randy.