Bots Broken

Looks like the ad remover's broken again. This is about the fourth time in a month, Yahoo must be up to something to keep rearranging their systems like this. The first couple lockdowns shut out my stream ripper :-(, now they've got another new layout for their ASX files. Oh well. For those of you who don't care, here's some pictures of a squirrel on water-skis.

Everyone else: The original ASX were pretty cool, standard mms: streams together with comments that could be used to figure out what the streams were, then they went and replaced them with HTTP streams that have these big long cryptic querystrings, presumably to keep track of users and resources and to tip off the FBI that you're spanking it to JoJo, who's only 15.

In either case the ads were served as separate streams and were easily taken out. Now it looks like they might be combining the ads into the same stream as the content, but I'm not sure yet. I've tried to take the new setup apart a little, but I grow bored with fixing this over and over.

I think the answer may be to quit using their own playlists, which are full of ads and Jennifer Lopez, and make my own playlist generator that feeds off the 'simmilar artists' feature. Be good practice for the new generation of spiders and scrapers I'm designing, the interact an absolute minimum with other sites, for less disruption and a smaller footprint in the logs. But not today. It's a beautiful afternoon and I'm going outside for awhile. Bye.

Created 2005-05-10 00:18:00 by 296 and filed under hacking