Unintentionally hilarious User Agent strings

AI-enabled (or incentivized?) web scraping and crawling is a scourge on the web. That said, some bot traffic did give me a chuckle today.

At Reclaim, we use Anubis to protect some sites targeted by bot traffic, providing an extra layer of DoS protection when needed. Anubis is an amazing tool, and the developer Xe is doing amazing work.

Today, while putting a site behind Anubis, I was monitoring the logs to make sure everything was working. The logs include the User Agent strings for client requests, and man, do these bots use some weird ones.

Internet Explorer 8 on Windows CE

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows CE; Trident/3.0)

Sure… I mean, I remember when this version of IE came out. If I had to guess, it was probably the peak of IE market share before Chrome took over, but that's just a guess. I'm no Windows CE expert, but I don't think IE 8 was available on it. But if you are telling me you're browsing this from Internet Explorer on a Compaq iPaq or a Sega Dreamcast, then who am I to doubt you?

Safari 5.0.4 on macOS El Capitan running a PowerPC Processor.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10_11_1 rv:3.0; st-ZA) AppleWebKit/535.37.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.4 Safari/535.37.1

Wild. I've never thought of trying to run a browser from 2010 on a version of macOS from 2015, but that is an interesting idea. It IS impressive to do all of that on a pre-Apple Silicon, pre-Intel Mac! They must really have done some magic with a Power Mac G5 to get that to run an OS almost a decade newer. Especially one that never supported the PowerPC architecture!

Mobile Safari 4 on iPhone OS 3.0 on an iPod

Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; byn-ER) AppleWebKit/535.6.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B112 Safari/6535.6.5

Ok, so this is supposedly an absolutely ancient version of iOS. I guess kudos for them remembering that it was "iPhone OS", not "iOS," at that time.

… But running on an iPod? Fascinating.

At first, I was absolutely imagining the glory of navigating the web via a click wheel.

But, I'm sure it's actually supposed to be an iPod Touch, which I can't believe I almost forgot about. My iPod Touch got a lot of use in high school and college, before I got my first smartphone.

I suppose that the matchup of device, OS, and browser almost makes sense, even if it's obviously super old, and all the specific version numbers don't quite line up.