Microsoft flooding sites with fake traffic

[VirginSnow at vfemail.net]

> Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:46:37 -0500
> From: "Arc Riley" <arcriley at gmail.com>

> Do yourselves a favor and search your logs for connections from 131.107.*
> 65.52.* 65.53.* 65.54.* and 65.55.*

> All of it, well 97.2%, from the above two subnets, belonging to Microsoft.

I don't seem to have this problem.  CF my robots.txt file:

  http://peapod.podzone.net:1234/robots.txt

which might explain why. :)

Interestingly, for me, hits from '^(131\.107|65.5[2-5])' seem to fall
into two categories:

 (1) requests for robots.txt (makes sense)
 (2) requests for content pages with *google* as referrer (hm...)

#2 suggests that msnbot is actually crawling *google* in order to
populate its *own* search database.  Maybe, knowing this, google could
give a good schticking to microsoft... by, say, returning
pseudo-random results to searches from '^(131\.107|65.5[2-5])' :)