I'm more interested in what that content farm is for. It looks pointless, but I suspect there's a bizarre economic incentive. There are affiliate links, but how much could that possibly bring in?
This is honeypot. The author, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Levine, keeps it just to notice any new (significant) scraping operation launched that will invariably hit his little farm and let be seen in the logs. He's well known anti-spam operative with his various efforts now dating back multiple decades.
Notice how he casually drops a link to the landing page in the NANOG message. That's how the bots will get a bait.
I recognize the name John Levine at iecc.com, "Invincible Electric Calculator Company," from web 1.0 era. He was the moderator of the Usenet comp.compilers newsgroup and wrote the first C compiler for the IBM PC RT
Linkers & Loaders is their own book (I haven't checked the others).
They have a page at https://www.iecc.com/linker/ where they used to publish a draft of the book contents, but changed the page to say "Chapters were available in an excessive variety of formats, but are not any longer due to chronic piracy", when it got posted to HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18424233 and I bundled the files for offline reading. I notified them via email about that asking if they are OK with it but got an unfriendly response that I pirated the files and that wasn't OK, so I took the link down again and they changed that text. (Shrug. I'm not a/the book author, they are. I'll say that I also suggested to them they ask on the page not to do what I did since then I wouldn't have, but they chose their more radical approach.)
It's for shits-and-giggles and it's doing its job really well right now. Not everything needs to have an economic purpose, 100 trackers, ads and backed by a company.
throw_a_grenade|1 year ago
Notice how he casually drops a link to the landing page in the NANOG message. That's how the bots will get a bait.
madkangas|1 year ago
https://compilers.iecc.com/
gtirloni|1 year ago
Octokiddie|1 year ago
dspillett|1 year ago
pflanze|1 year ago
They have a page at https://www.iecc.com/linker/ where they used to publish a draft of the book contents, but changed the page to say "Chapters were available in an excessive variety of formats, but are not any longer due to chronic piracy", when it got posted to HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18424233 and I bundled the files for offline reading. I notified them via email about that asking if they are OK with it but got an unfriendly response that I pirated the files and that wasn't OK, so I took the link down again and they changed that text. (Shrug. I'm not a/the book author, they are. I'll say that I also suggested to them they ask on the page not to do what I did since then I wouldn't have, but they chose their more radical approach.)
agilob|1 year ago
phyzome|1 year ago
schleck8|1 year ago