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

[Frank O'Connor]

Mmmm ...

... probably a server side VBScript (read ASP) that checks the user 
agent side of the browser using a Javascript (go figure!) in that 
page. Maybe even a VBScript that fails to execute on non-MS browsers 
and therefore triggers the response by default, server side. Perhaps 
the engines or client side features used on the site are proprietary 
to Microsoft (ActiveX controls and the like) and the lads concerned 
have now idea of how to do same using open standards.

What I wonder is what's gonna happen when MS.NET arrives. Are they 
gonna try and pass WinfForm and WebForm objects across the Web? Are 
they gonna use specific to MS RPC's and the like in SOAP, or use Web 
Services and the like as they are supposed to be used? It does not 
bode well for those sites.

Personally I will not use a site that I can't access with all of my 
browsers ... it is immediately scrubbed from further consideration. 
They can take the economic hit and higher transaction costs incurred 
by me using the more expensive old style ways of ordering/dealing or 
whatever. (And as a benefit, I may be saving/creating a few jobs!)

					Regards,

At 4:16 PM +1100 15/3/02, viveka wrote:
>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.


-- 
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Apathy is a great cause for concern
... but who cares?
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