In Photos dot org

Check your web server logs. The Google Photos Screensaver 2.0 web bot does not respect robots.txt rules. It tripped over my tarpit a few days ago and I just noticed it hitting the same url again this morning. It’s banned now.

The strange thing is, I saw two requests from this user agent a few minutes ago. One from 66.249.85.129 which is a Gooogle IP, and another from 117.193.129.58 which looks like an Indian IP.

Which one tripped over my tarpit? The Google IP address, 66.249.85.129 did.

If you want to ban “Google Photos Screensaver 2.0″, add these lines to the .htaccess in your root directory (presuming you have mod_rewrite enabled of course!)

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .*Google\ Photos\ Screensaver\ 2.0.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

I also ban a number of other user agents. This could could be merged into a few less lines but this makes it easy to add new lines quickly:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Microsoft\ URL\ Control.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} WebAlta\ Crawler/2\.0.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .*larbin.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Python-urllib.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} libwww-perl.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .*Indy\ Library.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .*Jakarta\ Commons-HttpClient.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

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