Tencent's 'Thinkbot' Crawler: A 74-IP, 41-Network Block Web War

A blogger discovered an unusually active web crawler called 'Thinkbot'. Tracing its activity revealed 74 unique IP addresses spread across 41 network blocks owned by Tencent, encompassing hundreds of thousands of IPs. The blogger speculates this is a large-scale data scraping operation by Tencent to externalize Great Firewall costs, and has added the IPs to a firewall rule set. This raises concerns about internet security and data sovereignty, highlighting the increasingly complex web battles in today's internet landscape.