I'm in fighting mode right now. I've been wondering why the stats for my blog continued to be full of crap from search.live.com - search results that were consistently one word, eg "email" or "contact", that had the same user environment and browser, and all originated in the ip range 65.55.x.x. So I went and investigated this, and found out that I am late to this particular party. Microsoft have been pulling this dirty trick on website owners for years now, playing havoc with site statistics, and claiming it is all in the interest of "quality control" (yup, the same quality control that brought you such wonders as Windows ME, Windows Vista, Microsoft Bob, need I go on?), and that it was temporary.

There is a write up on this farce here.

Well, red rag to a bull and all that... I have to have my rant. (This is after all my blog ;-) So, after thoughtfully banning Mickey-Mouse-Soft from ever viewing my site from their IP range ever again, I wondered if it might not be too much to ask the whole community of geeks to do something about this too? I mean, if every one of us added code to our .htaccess file, then MS would be unable to view roughly half of the sites available on the internet through their own IPs. Their search caching would collapse, or at least be made to jump through hoops.

Mean and vindictive? Probably. Do they deserve it? You betcha. It would certainly show the goons at MS what power there is in the internet, and that netizens are not to be crapped upon the way we currently are.

I may be naive in thinking that this will make a difference, but the ocean is filled with little drops of water.This request is for you to add a drop.

So, from ARIN Whois:

OrgName: Microsoft Corp

OrgID: MSFT

Address: One Microsoft Way

City: Redmond

StateProv: WA

PostalCode: 98052

Country: US

NetRange: 65.52.0.0 - 65.55.255.255

CIDR: 65.52.0.0/14

We have the range that search.live.com is coming from, being 65.55.x.x, and that is within the above scope.

That being said, to block search.live.com from accessing your website, the following can be added to your .htaccess file in the site root on an apache webserver:

<files 403.shtml>

order allow,deny

allow from all

</files>

deny from 65.55.

Also, for more information on this process, see here:

http://www.hybrid6.com/webgeek/2006/12/htaccess-ip-banning-block-bad-visitors.php

Should you be running B2Evolution 2.x, as I am, then you can easily add search.live.com to the spam blacklist, in the Admin, under Tools, antispam, and add search.live.com to the list to ban. The current B2Evo will also helpfully ask if you'd like to clear all the crap from the database from that particular referrer. Up to you. I culled 1300 entries!

So there it is. A call to action. The ball is in your court now; dear fellow geeks, nerds, and anti-monopolists.