[plug] DMA pricelist downloads (browser wars)

[Leon Brooks]

On Sunday 30 March 2003 20:12, Adam Davin wrote:
> With regard to the DMA website,

> I am using K-meleon on win, I was prompted yesterday to examine the
> certificate as it looks like they have had it re-issued (just expired) 
> After accepting the certificate it my browser connected through fine.

After the cert dialogue, Mozilla was told to turn off its download manager. 
Why? <shrug>

On top of this, Konqueror was told that it was illegally referred to the page 
and to please arrive from DMA's website! This happened regardless of what I 
told Konq to call itself for the occasion.

I captured the headers Mozilla was sending, altered the User-Agent string to 
say that it was Exploder, and got back a redirect. I can wget that redirect 
(on the same webserver) from anywhere in the world and it works. So much for 
security by obscurity...

It looks like they badly need the services of a competent Linux dude. Does 
anyone have the time?

I have a one-page gawk script which parses their pricelist (after 
preprocessing to HTML with Gnumeric) into SQL, plus a few pages of PHP that 
will display said pricelist in better form than DMA appear to be able to do. 
And I bet it took me a _lot_ less time to whomp up my kludge than they did 
theirs. (-:

Cheers; Leon