Stephen Downes

I clicked on this link shared by Apostolos K because I thought it would add to the body of coverage on this newsletter of scientific method and critical thinking, which it does, a bit. It's pretty short. But when I clicked on it, the CSS didn't render, which provoked my suspicions, and when I found a large block of obfuscated Javascript code my curiosity was piqued. It did keystroke monitoring and stuff like that and I thought it might be experimenting on readers. It turned out to be the top end of an access control and anti-bot system, probably the F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager. It works, too: I have a bookmarklet that analyzes pages I want to include in this newsletter (so I don't have to type the title, url, author, etc.) and it came back with an 'access rejected' response. Anyhow, I followed the trail all the way down; here's my thread as I figured out what's going on. That was my entire morning today.