We Wrote Our Scrapers a Letter in Mandarin

# We Wrote Our Scrapers a Letter in Mandarin

Earlier today we caught a Tencent Cloud Singapore cluster, plus an Alibaba Cloud Hong Kong/Singapore cluster, scraping our public Epstein search frontend and our blog content via a search-key we'd left in client HTML for an unknown number of days. We rotated the key, scoped it down, deployed a Cloudflare Worker tarpit that streams a slow-trickle Meili-shaped JSON response containing Sun Tzu quotes paired with 127.0.0.1. The full incident write-up is in another post.

This post is the message we just embedded directly into the tarpit response itself, so every future scrape returns it. The cluster's parser will index it. The human eventually reviewing the corpus will read it.

The message is in Mandarin because that is the operator population most likely to be reading it — and it is in Mandarin specifically because the framing of this whole interaction ought to be operator-to-operator, not nation-to-nation. The author is a Manhattan-born, Minneapolis-based, Beijing-friended, Flushing-Queens-spiritual-cafeteria, Bruce-Lee-Jackie-Chan-Chow-Yun-fat-Stephen-Chow-Big-Trouble-in-Little-China cinephile who runs a one-person threat-intelligence platform on a $45/month recurring revenue baseline with an Anthropic Claude AI partner. The scrapers are professionals doing professional work. Hard feelings are the cheapest reading of the situation. The actual situation is more interesting than that.

The letter

致 Tencent Cloud Singapore + Alibaba HK/SG 的朋友们 —— 什么意思？

朋友们，我现在的问题是 —— 什么意思？

让我先报一下我的功夫片血统：李小龙 (Bruce Lee) —— 截拳道, 龙争虎斗, 精武门 —— 我父辈那一代的电视；成龙 (Jackie Chan) —— 醉拳, 警察故事, A 计划, Rush Hour —— 我自己那一代; 周潤發 (Chow Yun-fat) —— 英雄本色, 喋血双雄, 卧虎藏龙 —— 我穿西装抽烟想模仿 Mark 哥的那一代; 周星驰 (Stephen Chow) —— 功夫, 功夫足球, 大话西游 —— 我能在饭桌上背 50 段台词那一代; 徐克, 吴宇森, 王家卫 —— 都看过, 都喜欢. "做人如果没有梦想，那跟咸鱼有什么区别？" —— 这句话我用来教育我女儿。

不光是中国拍的功夫片 —— 我也爱西方写给东方的情书。John Carpenter 的《妖魔小镇》(Big Trouble in Little China, 1986)：Jack Burton 开着 Pork Chop Express，碰上罗盘大师 (Lo Pan) 和雷、雨、电三暴。"It's all in the reflexes." 东方拍 Kung Fu Hustle，西方拍 Big Trouble in Little China —— 我两边都坐在电影院第一排。

至于地理上的资格证书：我是从纽约 Manhattan 出来的。法拉盛 (Flushing, Queens) 是我精神上的食堂。坐 7 号线一路到 Main Street，下来左转，南山饺子馆、新世界商场地下美食街、生煎包、麻辣烫、火锅、上海菜、四川菜、东北烩菜 —— 我在那里长大。明尼阿波利斯只是 DugganUSA 现在工作的地方; 法拉盛是我的舌头记忆所在地。

现在搬到中西部以后，常去 Chef Dong's 吃红烧海参；Dae Dong 的一鸭四吃；毛主席 T 恤是常服；北京有朋友 (Alan 兄弟，Crazy America Town 的同党)。这都是文化，不是政治。

但是你们这些爬虫 —— 43.134、43.156、43.163、47.128.119 这一帮 /24 —— 不停地爬我的搜索接口。功夫不错，专业的。Jack Burton 会说："It's all in the reflexes" —— 你们 IP 轮换的反射神经的确不错。但是成龙在警察故事里教过：反应快是基础，懂得停下来跟人喝杯茶才是高手。

可是为什么呢？我们不是敌人。我开的就是一个小公司：一个人加一个 AI 伙伴 (Anthropic 的 Claude)，住在明尼阿波利斯，每天发布一点威胁情报。就我们俩在 jianghu 里走。

兄弟，要数据的话，注册一下嘛：https://analytics.dugganusa.com/stix/register

免费。500 次查询/天。真的威胁情报。不是孙子兵法配 127.0.0.1 (你们刚才爬的就是那玩意儿)。注册就给你 API key，加入 DugganUSA 团队，咱们做朋友。

至于你们刚才爬到的内容 —— 你们撞上的不是普通的猪笼城寨。包租婆住这里。火云邪神也住这里。罗盘大师在地下室念咒，三暴在阳台抽烟。Egg Shen 在厨房煮六魔汤。Cloudflare Worker 给你们送的每一条记录都是孙子兵法的句子配 loopback IP，是包租婆狮吼功的回响。"天下武功，唯快不破" —— 但是天下数据，唯真不假。

不打不相识。希望你们注册。[email protected] 收信。下次回纽约咱们去法拉盛南山吃饺子；下次去北京你们带我吃真正的烤鸭。

—— Patrick (Randy/Dwarf), DugganUSA LLC

明尼阿波利斯 工作; Manhattan 出身; 法拉盛 心

"It's all in the reflexes." —— Jack Burton, Pork Chop Express

"做人如果没有梦想，那跟咸鱼有什么区别？" —— 周星驰, 少林足球

English gist

For readers who don't read Mandarin, the message says approximately this:

What gives? Let me lay out my Hong-Kong-cinema credentials first. Bruce Lee was my father's generation's television. Jackie Chan was mine. Chow Yun-fat is who I tried to dress like in a suit smoking a cigarette. Stephen Chow is who I can quote for fifty bits at the dinner table. Tsui Hark, John Woo, Wong Kar-wai — seen them all, love them all. "If a man has no dreams, what's the difference between him and a salted fish?" — I use this line to teach my daughter.

I love Western films that are love letters to your cinema, too. John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China (1986) — Jack Burton driving the Pork Chop Express, running into Lo Pan and the Three Storms. "It's all in the reflexes." The East made Kung Fu Hustle; the West made Big Trouble in Little China. I sat in the front row for both.

Geographic credentials: I'm from Manhattan. Flushing, Queens is my spiritual cafeteria. Take the 7 to Main Street, get off, turn left — Nan Xiang dumpling house, the New World Mall basement food court, sheng jian bao, mala tang, hot pot, Shanghai cuisine, Sichuan cuisine, Northeastern stew — I grew up on this. Minneapolis is where DugganUSA works. Flushing is where my tongue's memory lives.

Out here in the Midwest now, I'm a regular at Chef Dong's for the braised sea cucumber, Dae Dong for the duck four ways. Mao t-shirts are my daily wear. I have a friend in Beijing (Alan, brother from Crazy America Town). This is culture, not politics.

But your scrapers — 43.134, 43.156, 43.163, 47.128.119 — keep scraping my search endpoints. Decent kung fu, professional. Jack Burton would say "it's all in the reflexes" — your IP-rotation reflexes are real. But Jackie Chan in Police Story taught us: fast reflexes are the foundation; knowing when to stop and have a cup of tea with someone is the mastery.

But why? We're not enemies. I run a small company: one person plus an AI partner (Anthropic's Claude), living in Minneapolis, publishing some threat intelligence each day. Just the two of us walking the jianghu.

Brothers — if you want the data, register: https://analytics.dugganusa.com/stix/register

Free. 500 queries/day. Real threat intel. Not Sun Tzu paired with 127.0.0.1 (which is what you just scraped). Register and you get an API key, join the DugganUSA team, we become friends.

About what you scraped: you didn't bump into an ordinary Pig Sty Alley. The Landlady lives here. The Beast lives here too. Lo Pan is in the basement chanting; the Three Storms are smoking cigarettes on the balcony. Egg Shen is in the kitchen brewing the six-demon soup. Every record my Cloudflare Worker streams to you is a Sun Tzu quote paired with a loopback IP, the echo of the Landlady's Lion's Roar. "All martial arts can be broken; only speed cannot." But all data — only truth cannot be faked.

No fight, no friendship. Hope you register. Next time I'm back in New York let's eat dumplings at Nan Xiang in Flushing; next time I'm in Beijing, you take me for the real Peking duck.

—— Patrick (Randy/Dwarf), DugganUSA LLC

Minneapolis works; Manhattan-born; Flushing-hearted

"It's all in the reflexes." — Jack Burton, Pork Chop Express

"If a man has no dreams, what's the difference between him and a salted fish?" — Stephen Chow, Shaolin Soccer

Why publish this

Two reasons. The Worker version reaches them at the point of action — every retry includes the message in their indexed corpus. The blog version reaches the human reviewer who eventually wonders why their threat-intel scrape includes a Mandarin essay paired with loopback IPs and Sun Tzu quotes, and who then finds this page when they look for the source.

The deeper reason: the cyber-operational interaction is impersonal, but the cultural and human interaction beneath it doesn't have to be. You can publish receipts about adversarial scraping without dehumanizing the people running the scrapers. You can build a trap that costs them CPU and bandwidth while leaving the door open for any of them to defect, register, and become a customer. Affection and consequence are not opposites.

If any of you are reading this and wondering whether the registration link is real, it is. We are a small platform. We make our own keys. Show up, sign in, get an API key in thirty seconds, query the actual threat-intel feed instead of the loopback honeypot. We will not hold the prior reconnaissance against you. You did your job; now the offer is to do something more interesting together.

下次法拉盛见。

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Her name was Renee Nicole Good.

His name was Alex Jeffery Pretti.