Media Center
Press Release
December 12, 1999
Buellingen (Belgium)
Freeware Spider Trap
Belgian based webmasters' software developers fantomaster.com have announced the release of their latest product: fantomas blockFrog™, a server based Perl/CGI program enabling webmasters to block predefined IPs from accessing their sites.
“This program helps protect web sites from code nappers and contents snoops with their aggressive, bandwidth consuming spiders. It effectively counters established privacy invaders, spammers, extractor bots, etc. Moreover, it constitutes a safeguard against unwarranted, frivolous litigation centered around alleged infringements of trademarks, copyrights and patents,” says Marketing Manager Ralph Tegtmeier, an internet entrepreneur of six years' standing. “What with competition on the web becoming fiercer by the day, there's a lot of people out there after your hide. They will check, among other things, whether your site is infringing trade marks and violating copyright, and so on. More often than not, their snoop bots are quite aggressive, deep crawling (and presumably caching) your site without your permission, ignoring the robots.txt convention, etc.
“It is for cases like these that we devised fantomas blockFrog™, the spider trap. We were not particularly amused by this sort of activity, even though we have nothing to hide. This program helps webmasters regain control over who may access their site. The attacking IP's spider is neatly put to sleep without draining local CPU resources or creating bandwidth loads beyond a few hundred bytes for the whole operation.
“Legitimate pursuit of copyright infringements and trademark piracy etc. is one thing,” Tegtmeier goes on to explain, “but violation of privacy and provocation of unwarranted, frivolous litigation because of mere greediness is another. “If you've got serious money to lose, or if you only give that impression, it's a fairly safe bet that some shark will try to get at it sooner or later. This may very well concern webmasters' clients as well. Seeing that people have been (and are being) sued for a mere link on their site in some more restrictive and punitive jurisdictions, this issue should not be trivialized. As a webmaster, if you simply so much as mention Microsoft Windows or Dell or what have you on your site, you run a very realistic risk of being sued to exctinction these days.”
Tegtmeier is not worried about possible abuse of this technology: “We certainly do not endorse trademark piracy or theft of intellectual property. After all, we're in that very business ourselves, so we really wouldn't want to see ourselves getting ripped off the fruits of our intellectual efforts and labor. However, the web being what it is, chances are pretty slim that you can get away with piracy and theft of copyrighted material or patent rights in the long run. In any case, our free program won't permit restricting access to unwanted IPs on a massive scale. Software pirates are not at all welcome on our site, and they certainly won't find whatever they may be looking for in our fantomas blockFrog™.”
The software was developed in cooperation with Brocon GmbH, a Belgian corporation specialized in database management, SAP consulting, retail sales administration — and, recently, search engine positioning software as well as web site management solutions.
fantomaster.com — Director Ralph Tegtmeier
“While we are located in a Western European business environment — this being the German speaking part of Eastern Belgium, our initial efforts in positioning our products and services on the internet are focused on the international, English speaking market. Consequently, all our products are available in both English and German versions.”
“What's more, our prime priority is user friendliness. The internet has lived through some dramatic changes in recent years. One phenomenon being the arrival of the mainstream webmaster. The days of ultra tech savvy geeks are drawing to an end, and so actually is web masters' patience: in an ever more competitive environment, software solutions must be genuine time savers.”
“Nobody is interested in tweaking and fiddling with exotic, hard to understand solutions. Installation must be zappy, and so must day to day handling and maintenance. This is what we strive achieve with our clear and simple user interfaces, making installation and administration of our program a breeze even for the less experienced webmaster.”
Beyond their software products palette, fantomaster.com also offers search engine positioning consultation services and features what is probably the world's most comprehensive search engine spiders database, a rental service marketed as fantomas spiderSpy™.
Technical product info here
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