Because of a decison taken by Microsoft many web sites that appears in a user’s prefered language will suddenly stop working if the site uses content language negotiation.

They have abused the language infomrmation to make it easier for web applications to recognise location of users.

The fault applies to almost all languages.

As an example,

Essentially, if you are in Mexico, IE 7 will set your only language to Mexican Spanish, in France you would get French from France. Many sites that use language negotiation for to reach generic Spanish or French pages, will suddenly provide their default (commonly English) page instead.

Victims sites of this decision include the World Wide Web Consortium site w3.org

See Richard Ishida’s blog for some more information.

A simple fix would have been to provide both the fully localised language descriptor (e.g. en-US and the generic on e.g. en).

A blog spammer, has recently been trying to leave its rubbish on this site. Interstingly, each time it was denied, it tries again pretending to be a different user agent, without any repeats.

Access from the same IP address (64.28.178.66) repeatedly tries to access random blog pages, some of which don’t even exist.

Here’s an extract from the log…

64.28.178.66 – - [10/Oct/2006:20:17:50 +0100] “GET /blog/?p=13 HTTP/1.1″ 403 279 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Q312461; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”
64.28.178.66 – - [10/Oct/2006:20:37:34 +0100] “GET /blog/?p=21 HTTP/1.1″ 403 279 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050225 Firefox/1.0.1″
64.28.178.66 – - [10/Oct/2006:21:52:26 +0100] “GET /blog/?p=6 HTTP/1.1″ 403 279 “-” “EVE-minibrowser/”
64.28.178.66 – - [10/Oct/2006:22:16:38 +0100] “GET /blog/?p=14 HTTP/1.1″ 403 279 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412.5″
64.28.178.66 – - [10/Oct/2006:22:22:55 +0100] “GET /blog/?p=11 HTTP/1.1″ 403 279 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT)”
64.28.178.66 – - [10/Oct/2006:22:53:52 +0100] “GET /blog/?p=34 HTTP/1.1″ 403 279 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”
64.28.178.66 – - [10/Oct/2006:22:54:48 +0100] “GET /blog/?p=22 HTTP/1.1″ 403 279 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; Maxthon; iOpus-I-M; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”
64.28.178.66 – - [11/Oct/2006:00:34:53 +0100] “GET /blog/index.php?p=30 HTTP/1.1″ 403 288 “-” “OmniExplorer_Bot/3.11c (+http://www.omni-explorer.com) WorldIndexer”
64.28.178.66 – - [11/Oct/2006:01:29:30 +0100] “GET /blog/index.php?p=30 HTTP/1.1″ 403 288 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; [eburo v1.3]; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”
64.28.178.66 – - [11/Oct/2006:01:31:14 +0100] “GET /blog/?p=10 HTTP/1.1″ 403 279 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT)”
64.28.178.66 – - [11/Oct/2006:03:09:43 +0100] “GET /blog/?p=18 HTTP/1.1″ 403 279 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (firatnyvr; MSIE 6.0; ; SV1)”
64.28.178.66 – - [11/Oct/2006:04:50:30 +0100] “GET /blog/?p=14 HTTP/1.1″ 403 279 “-” “OmniExplorer_Bot/3.11c (+http://www.omni-explorer.com) WorldIndexer”
64.28.178.66 – - [11/Oct/2006:12:01:03 +0100] “GET /blog/?p=13 HTTP/1.1″ 403 279 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041116 Firefox/1.0 (Ubuntu) (Ubuntu package 1.0-2ubuntu3)”
64.28.178.66 – - [11/Oct/2006:12:18:56 +0100] “GET /blog/?p=21 HTTP/1.1″ 403 279 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (cOsmO&SoNnE; MSIE 6.0; Windows XP)”
64.28.178.66 – - [11/Oct/2006:13:33:53 +0100] “GET /blog/?p=6 HTTP/1.1″ 403 279 “-” “LinkWalker”
64.28.178.66 – - [11/Oct/2006:13:57:28 +0100] “GET /blog/?p=14 HTTP/1.1″ 403 279 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT)”
64.28.178.66 – - [11/Oct/2006:14:04:21 +0100] “GET /blog/?p=11 HTTP/1.1″ 403 279 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firechicken/1.0″
64.28.178.66 – - [11/Oct/2006:16:39:33 +0100] “GET /blog/?p=2 HTTP/1.1″ 403 279 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1″

Does anyone know anything about this outfit?