Unfortunately, the SMTP listener was terminated for some reason Fridayat 1pm, so some of the weekly stats are going to be way off. But havingsaid that, there are some alarming numbers this week:

• got 12,863 messages from 215 different IP addresses.
• handled 19,196 sessions from 1,271 different IP addresses.
• received 201,196 connections from at least 9,670 different IPaddresses since Friday at 1pm

Recently I have become quite irritated at a couple of websites that Ivisit regularly. See, they have a membership system, and I'm a dulypaid member (I like them and it has some benefits (that I rarely use)),and they recently switched to using session cookies for logins. Whichmeans that every day when I visit, I get to make a time-wasting detourthrough their login page.

It's tempting to think that if you use session cookies, the users are'

To follow up my earlier entry on this stuff,I just saw another stunned monkey moment :

• you can't randomly add a trailing slash to URLs any more thanyou can randomly remove them.
• especially when the URL includes a query parameter, because thenyou're changing the query. And that always works really well.

From the pattern of the stealth spider's requests, I think it is addingthe trailing slash on any URL that doesn't end in a filename with anextension. This is stunningly