Builder.com.au has this new post today with information on how to create a socket to a remote server and fetch the information there.

Web page ripping, also known as screen scraping, is the art of downloading a document from the Web, parsing it for a particular piece of content, and then incorporating that information into your own page.

In this tutorial we take a quick look at the different ways in which server-side HTTP connections can be made using ASP, ASP.NET and PHP, and how they can be adapted to a range of applications.

The majority of the article is devoted to the ASP code to get the job done (gee, it's longer than the PHP code), but they do follow it up with a handy little PHP script using the cURL extension to grab the remote information...