phil ringnalda

Anyone have any good ideas about what’s attacking Luke Hutteman? I say attacking, because I can’t think of any natural way to wind up with Firefox requesting a file with a referrer that doesn’t actually link to it. To me, it smells like someone with a bunch of zombies deciding to take him down, for whatever nonsense reason might motivate such a senseless thing.

The one natural way I can think of would be to have a link in the page you want as a referrer go to a script which only returns a redirect to Luke to Firefox users, which would pass on the BBC RSS page as a referrer, but since all the links go to BBC pages, and I’d be surprised if a thousand Firefox users open that BBC feed in their browser in a day, much less click one particular link, I can’t imagine that’s actually it. I just can’t see any other way of doing it, short of a bunch of zombies sending requests with fake user agent strings and fake referrers.

If you’ve got any other ideas, about causes or forensic methods or cures (short of just refusing to serve that version to Firefox), Luke could use your comments.