The Fourth Kind
August 19th, 2009I noticed some chatter in a couple of nonsense polluted backwaters about a psychologist and some related cases in the upcoming alien abduction film, The Fourth Kind. At first, I wasn’t going to post anything about this, but to head off people from emailing me about it, I decided to go ahead:
I spent about five minutes looking into this, including watching the trailer, and there is no Dr. Abigail Tyler. This is a Blair Witch-style “documentary” based on the massive body of alien abduction literature.
Also, I found the firm that Universal is apparently using to game Google (see my Goldman Sachs code torrent antics) to track people who are looking for information about the film.
Here is the Google results page for “Abigail Tyler” abduction at the moment:
That constellation.net thing is some kind of honeypot that’s capturing data from Google (and possibly other) searches. When you click the link from Google, constellation.net captures your information and then simply forwards you back to the Google homepage.
Apparently, constellation.net is not allowing the URL to be visited without the right referral headers being transmitted. I have better things to do today than than fiddle with this, but the constellation.net home page has a link to linxworks.com, the site for a company called Linxworks Solutions. I’m sure that you can do the rest of the math from there, if you’re interested.
To the propeller heads out there who can’t help yourselves: Try pretending to be Googlebot and see if it will let you in. Are they blocking it by IP as well as referrer? In other words, even if you look like Googlebot, do you actually have to come from a Google IP?
