Posts Tagged ‘Mesothelioma & Asbestos Awareness Center’

Nastiness on the Internet?

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

Back on September 18th, 2008, I wrote a piece about a run-in I’d had with David Latimer of the Mesothelioma & Asbestos Awareness Center.   The piece is here:  ➡

The piece itself, and the comments about it, makes for interesting reading so I won’t go into any of the specifics here.  But, I do encourage you to go and have a look.

After the initial burst of comments and E-mail about the original piece, I didn’t think much more about it.

But the other day, more than a month later, as I was looking through my Internet Logs to see where my traffic was coming from, I noticed a really odd pattern.   The second most visited page on my Blog was the piece on the Mesothelioma & Asbestos Awareness Center.

It made me curious why this piece should be so popular so I went digging and was surprised to find that all of the visits to this page on my Blog were coming from IP addresses in the range of 84.109.*.*    For example, one visit might come from 84.109.121.176 while the next might come from 84.109.104.179.   But all of them are coming from addresses that begin with 84.109.

Addresses on the Internet are often owned in ranges or blocks like this. I traced a dozen or more these addresses variations back to their source and they were ALL coming from a single Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Israel.   The ISP is www.bezeqint.net which is located at:

Bezeq International Ltd.
40 Hashacham street, Ramat-Siv
PO Box 7097
49170 Petach Tikva
Israel

When one of the ISP’s customers requests access to the Internet, the IPS issues them one of the IP addresses from the block the ISP owns.   This is why each time someone shows up on my Blog from Bezeq, they have a slightly different IP address.

So, what does it all mean?   Well, most probably Bezeq, the Israeli company, has a customer that has some sort of a deep and persistent interest in the Mesothelioma & Asbestos Awareness Center web page on my Samadhisoft Blog. 

The question. of course, is why is this person so interested?

If you look at the pattern of their visits, it is puzzling what they are doing.   Check this out.  These are all the visits today and yesterday.   All of these came from one of the Bezeq ISP company’s IP addresses:

081102 – 12:23:07 – 01m09s – 2 reloads
081102 – 10:13:52 – 00m50s – 2 reloads
081102 – 09:09:26 – 00m31s – 2 reloads
081102 – 08:50:40 – 00m42s – 2 reloads
081102 – 08:42:55 – 00m??s – 0 reloads (*)
081102 – 08:07:49 – 00m19s – 1 reload
081102 – 08:07:30 – 01m11s – 1 reload
081102 – 07:21:11 – 00m??s – 0 reloads
081101 – 15:59:50 – 00m??s – 0 reloads
081101 – 15:33:59 – 00m48s – 1 reload
081101 – 15:33:19 – 00m52s – 2 reloads
081101 – 15:32:51 – 00m27s – 1 reload
081101 – 15:31:44 – 00m??s – 0 reloads
081101 – 13:49:21 – 00m54s – 2 reloads
081101 – 13:28:56 – 00m26s – 1 reload
081101 – 12:10:32 – 00m51s – 2 reloads
081101 – 09:58:08 – 00m??s – 0 reloads
081101 – 09:14:21 – 00m57s – 2 reloads
081101 – 08:46:52 – 00m47s – 2 reloads
081101 – 08:33:04 – 00m42s – 2 reloads
081101 – 08:04:06 – 00m42s – 2 reloads
081101 – 08:02:37 – 00m35s – 2 reloads
081101 – 07:54:22 – 00m34s – 2 reloads
081101 – 07:03:39 – 00m??s – 0 reloads

– At least one of these visits (*) came through a proxy server based in Saudi Arabia. though its original IP address was still shown as 84.109.*.*.

The way to read the list above is like so:   If the line says

081101 – 08:02:37 – 00m35s – 2 reloads

It means that on 2008, November, 1st @ 8:02:37 I had a visit to my page that was 35 sec long and the Mesothelioma page was reloaded by the viewer twice.

It is an odd pattern, no doubt.   They come in directly to the Mesothelioma page again and again and stay anywhere from 30 seconds to a little over a minute and then depart.  They may or may not reload the page once or twice during their visit.  Yesterday, November 1st, they visited the Mesothelioma page like this 16 times.  Today, they had made eight visits by midday.

Perhaps, they are visiting the page to make it look popular?   Perhaps, but it makes no sense to me because the only folks who would care are the Mesothelioma lawyers and this page is very likely more of a liability that an asset to them.

The only other reason I can think why someone would be visiting it so much is if they are trying to work out how to attack the page and take it down because it is a problem for someone.

I don’t know – it is all a mystery.   But, something a bit stinky and mysterious is going on.   Stay tuned, I’ll post more if I learn anything more.

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Mesothelioma & Asbestos Awareness Center

Thursday, September 18th, 2008
“Every corner of the public psyche is canvassed by some of the most talented citizens to see if the desire for some merchandisable product can be cultivated.”John Kenneth Galbraith

– Beware, Bloggers!

There is some stinky stuff going on with these folks:

The Mesothelioma & Asbestos Awareness Center

– Several days ago, a comment appeared on one of my posts on this Blog.   The commenter asked me to contact him about my Blog.   I wrote him an E-mail back asking “What’s up” and got the following reply:

Hi Dennis,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I represent the Mesothelioma and Asbestos Awareness Center, an asbestos health resource site dedicated to spreading knowledge about mesothelioma and the hazards of asbestos exposure. We have recently begun reaching out to environmental advocacy groups in the interest of spreading awareness of our important topic.

The processing of fossil fuels and our reliance on outdated energy sources is harming our environment and harming the workers of our country. In recent months we have seen a surge of asbestos health complications among those who worked in oil refineries and other energy processing centers, mainly due to the amount of asbestos used in these industries.

Few people realize that our environmental attitudes and behaviors are harming not only the earth for our children but also the workers who toil in these hazardous environments. To this end, I was wondering if you would consider posting an informative article or mesothelioma resource link on your site. It is our hope that through building awareness of the harmful effects (both now and in the future) of our current attitudes towards energy we can save both our planet and lives.

I thank you for your time and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Kindly,

Dave

– I wrote him back saying:

I’d consider posting an informative article.   No promises.   If you send me the article or a link to it on-line, I’ll have a look.

– And he replied:

Hi Dennis,

Take a look at an article and interview of ours that is posted here:

http://www.globalwarmingisreal.com/blog/2008/09/04/reliance-on-fossil-fuel-%E2%80%93-an-environmental-and-health-issue/

Let me know what you think.  Give me suggestions of particular questions you’d like answered in an article for your site.

Thanks!

-Dave

– On the surface, this all looked reasonable.  Good people working for a good cause, right?   Why shouldn’t I chip in and help them spread the message?

– But, something didn’t feel right about all of this.   I’ve gotten E-mails in the past from Spammers trying to drum up business for ambulance chasers of one type and another.  Just the other day, I’d gotten one entitled, “Do you or a loved one suffer from Asbestos poisoning?“

-So I started digging.   I didn’t have to dig far.  At the bottom of the  Mesothelioma and Asbestos Awareness Center website is text that asserts, “Thank you for visiting this website which is sponsored by the Law Firm of EARLY, LUDWICK, SWEENEY & STRAUSS, LLC.“

– EARLY, LUDWICK, SWEENEY & STRAUSS, LLC, is a law firm that describes itself on its web site as follows:

“Since April 1980, Early, Ludwick, Sweeney & Strauss has been a leading asbestos law firm in the United States representing plaintiffs in lawsuits against the asbestos industry.“

This was a disappointment.  David hadn’t mentioned that he was associated with a Law firm.

– So, was he really trying to do a public service and increase public awareness of  issues surrounding Mesothelioma & Asbestos – or was he trying to find a cheap way to drive web traffic to the law firm’s web site and hoping to use naive and idealistic Bloggers like myself to help implement an advertising campaign for him on the cheap?

– I decided to dig further by Googling “EARLY, LUDWICK, SWEENEY & STRAUSS, LLC”.   Pages and pages of uninteresting stuff passed until I came across the following:

“Law Firm Caught with Hand in Asbestos Cookie Jar” ➡

– It makes for interesting reading.

– To my idealistic Blogger friends and readers:

– The moral of this story is that there are folks out there who may think us naive.  And they may be snaky enough to try to use our naivety to get free advertising for themselves.  The Internet is a snake pit – so what’s new?  

– These folks may pretend to be idealistically motivated just like us – but it’ll be a ruse to get us to promote their interests – which are focused primarily on putting money in their own pocket by driving web traffic to their sites by using us as cheap advertisers for them.

– Don’t let them sucker you!

19 September 08 – Follow up: 

– I’m frequently annoyed by automated Blogs whose creators setup software to search the web for any content related to a specific subject and then create auto-posts on their own ‘pretend’ Blogs linking to that original content and generate automatically posted comments on the original post referring to their own site. 

-These mind-less automated sites are just attempts to drive traffic by ads so their creators can make a few bucks and they don’t care a whit that they’re clogging the Internet up with their shit and causing folks like me extra work to clear their trash comments off my Blog daily. 

– But I simply had to laugh today when two different auto Blogger websites focused on Mesothelioma and Asbestos picked up links to this article and automatically generated posts and made auto comments on my site referring to their posts.   As if my original post was in support of what they are doing – rather than trashing it.

– I deleted the auto generated comments on my site as I do daily but somewhere out there are two bogus Mesothelioma and Asbestos Blogs with pointers to my article.  And I think that’s hoot!

02 November 2008 Follow up:

– I’ve had some more adventures with regard to this page which you might want to read about here: ➡ 

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