is there anyone from china? i tried accessing renderosity when in china over the weekend..it seemed to have been firewalled by the government. I could access it only thru some coded site my cousin had.. slow though and with loads of weird ads on it. some links weren't working.

weird though.. cnn, bbc all banned. didn't know about the protests till i got back to HK. It's like living a dream world with all the censorship.

Ah the Tibet thing ! yes that's going on . . . I protested by working 9 hours - I think the chinese government would love it if i took a break - so i didn't. 

'Rosity is probably censored there because of the nude content :-)

Nude Content? Where?!! J/K

gets filter/blocked at work too.

In the secret pr0n dir of one of the developers grin

IT is my understanding that you can't get the internet in China unless you get a license from the Gov and that is only for approved sites.

Chinas government sucks like that.

They should actually just threaten to cancel the olympics if china doesnt meet its promises. But once again politics are executed weakly. It seems we have learned nothing from the cold war... All skills developed there, have been thrown right out the window again.

Cold war politics, despite all the complexity and secrecy at least had a strong basic format:
Action => Reaction

These days, the format looks more like this:
Possibility => Demands/guidelines => Acknowledgement & agreement of terms => Failure to meet terms => Lack of sanctions.

I'm not saying we should go back to flirting with global atomic warfare, secret agenda's, lies and deception, but we should all be pushing our agreements a lot more forcefully.

Renderosity may be banned in China, but cgtalk doesn't seem to be as I've noticed a good number of members both posting images and comments on images who are from China. Cgtalk does have nudity, but not as much, not nearly as poor quality and certainly not as gratuitious as you find on Renderosity

like my uncle, some pple get their internet rigged so it breaks thru the firewall. blogs, news,  etc is firewalled. i find that rather amusing, though surreal

It seems unfair that China can block people from all those sites..yet every day their robot webcrawlers crawl all over my domain...gathering their info....

I've found their bots on my site too.

Once I ran across a simple fix for it..but at the time didn't know I needed it...and now I don't remember where it was or what it was called.  I do remember it was a text file of some kind that tells your website what can get in and what info it could get from the site.  All you had to do was block it in the text.  Google and other websites do the same thing..its the way they get your info to put in their searches..but you can control what info they get.
Guess i need to search for it again.

yep ! let us know when you find it.  

**It's called robots.txt file
**

Here are a couple of helpful pages..and if you do a search on google for  **robots.text file ** you can get all kinds of info to sort thru..   [

robot text file](http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html)

many examples on this page

Thank you ! from what I read though it won't stop malicious bots as they will ignore the robots.txt file.
 
A lot of sites have a script to make you identify a series of  alpha-numerics in pictoral form (usually 3 or 5) to access the site, or download stuff. Passwords (like Renderosity's) are another way to go but then there has to be a record and a registration process somewhere. I don't  have any plans to write a script like that or actively look one up but if happen to run across one I 'll be sure to let you know.  

even then a reference to a specific page in say google might sneak around the logon... 

Quote - Once I ran across a simple fix for it..but at the time didn't know I needed it...and now I don't remember where it was or what it was called.  I do remember it was a text file of some kind that tells your website what can get in and what info it could get from the site.  All you had to do was block it in the text.  Google and other websites do the same thing..its the way they get your info to put in their searches..but you can control what info they get.
Guess i need to search for it again.

It's called a "robots.txt" and you put it in the root directory of the site.

This link http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html will takes you there for more info.

TS

I seem to remember a regular poster here that was in China.  I don't think that person was Chinese but did reside there.  I think they did a lot of aviation images.

robots.txt files are used to control search engine indexing.
Basically you can tell bots where to and where not to search. These robots.txt files are a web standard and most major search engines support it.

Malicious bots are built to be malicious, thus will probably ignore any standard that stands in its way. A malicious bot, like any other, is a piece of software. Software does only what it is built to do. If its not built to user robots.txt files, it simply wont do anything with them.

Btw, I wouldnt recommend blocking your entire site from bots by means of a robots.txt, as it will just mean google and the likes wont index your site, which makes it much harder for people to find.

I dont think there is much you can do if the chinese government decides to firewall your site. Its a corrupt government deciding entirely on its own terms what it does or does not like.

I don't care if the chinese govt blocks my site...what I don't particularly like is their bots crawling my site and harvesting whatever info they can...in my case its my blog that I don't like them on.....
and you can't even use an email address anymore without spammers getting it with their bots.
Although I must say that I use Akismet and I haven't had any spam on my blog for the last year or so.....it comes with my WordPress software....so I'm happy about that.

AnnieD,[

http://www.mylittlehomepage.net/index_en](http://www.mylittlehomepage.net/index_en)

CAPTCHA is what they call what I was describing on Sat, Apr 12, 2008 3:46 pm. use the above link and goto miscellaneous/code collection CAPTCHA.
 
also try Googling the word CAPTCHA.

Okey dokey...thanks..   :biggrin:

You're most welcome ! !  I know I said I wasn't going to look it up but curiousity got the best of me - also someone wrote a CAPTCHA on code project, a site I've been looking at for years - you need to sign up for it but if you do any coding it's well worth it.

I don't really do anything other than webpage html and css...but I'm always interested in security and protection from spammers and phishers....hackers...etc.