I'm the father of Scooter, the robot behind Alta Vista. I can garantee you
that the robot does not do anything funny: no IP spoofing or other arguable
behavior. It is usually run from scooter.pa-x.dec.com, sometimes for short
tests from inside the Digital firewall. It sets the following fields:
User-Agent: Scooter/1.0 scooter@pa.dec.com
From: scooter@pa.dec.com
and it is registered at Martijn's site. It's anything but a stealth robot.
So please help squash this rumor.
I'll run this message by our network gurus, they might think of ways of catching
the bad guys.
Cheers,
--Louis