On Saturday, for the first time, I decided to peer down into my site stats. A few surprises awaited – not that the numbers were that impressive, an average of 6.8 hits/day. Wow. That’s going to make Instapundit quake in their boots, I don’t think. But the real surprises were down in the “last guests” reports. Who searched Google for “ian duncan smith+allegedely money”? Or “codenames for marriage proposals”? And why did they end up here of all places? Why do people searching for “folktales”! end up on the Ranter, when I’ve never covered anything to do with them? Who, for example, is regularly hitting the Ranter with a browser set to Farsi? Annoyingly, I’ve so far been unable to get WHOIS information for that one. But there was one rather special visitor:
Registrant:
hoobie (HOOBIE-DOM)
10 Downing Street
London, . SW1A 2AA
UK
Domain Name: HOOBIE.NET
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
James, Gerry (GJ2637) gerry.james.benevolent.fund@HOOBIE.NET
Gerry James Benevolent Fund
14 Aplegath Road
London W14 0HY
UK
0111 010 1100 fax: 1111 010 1101
Record expires on 29-May-2006.
Record created on 30-May-1997.
Database last updated on 10-Nov-2003 07:00:15 EST.
Domain servers in listed order:
NINJA.HOOBIE.NET 217.169.3.56
SECONDARY-DNS.CO.UK 194.74.197.135
Rather distinguished, no? As is the chap from the World Bank who apparently rants too. Obviously I googled, and could find no-one who sounded even vaguely likely, only a civil servant in California, a minor academic in Indiana and an obscure golfer. A little thought, though, and I found out that hoobie.net was a hacker tools site. Including a wardriving map of wireless networks in central London. Which may explain the impressive address (at least the postcode is genuine).