[LINK] Connection Refused: what ever happened to 404?

[viveka]

At 3:05pm +1000 15/3/02, Chirgwin, Richard wrote:
[snip]
>But lately, I'm getting a more disturbing error message: "The connection was
>refused when attempting to connect to..."
>
>The same site will work okay in IE.
>
>Any thoughts as to why this would pop up as the 'don't like your browser'
>error message?

Possibly, the server is looking to only allow known user-agents as a 
way to keep out spambots.

The risk: this will keep you off some search engines, if you don't 
know the user-agent of their crawler. Also, it will keep out people 
with any browser not on the list, such as Richard with NN6. Further, 
if you don't explicitly include the user-agents of screen-readers on 
your list, you're likely to be in breach of the disability services 
act.

And of course, it won't work against real spambots; there is no way 
to enforce truthful reporting of user-agents. Linkers will be aware 
that many browsers allow you to modify your user-agent for this 
precise reason (Opera and iCab for example make it easy to masquerade 
as IE5, which also skews the browser statistics that people quote 
from their server logs).

Regards,

V.
-- 
Viveka Weiley, Karmanaut.
{ http://www.karmanaut.com | http://www.planet-earth.org
    http://www.MacWeb3D.org | http://sydney.siggraph.org.au }
Hypermedia, virtual worlds, human interface, truth, beauty.