Monday, July 31, 2006

8-bit Internet Time Machine

Here's the oddest fucking user agent I think I've ever seen:

"IE/6.01 (CP/M; 8-bit)"
Are you shitting me?

Someone is still using an 8-bit computer with CP/M and accessing the Internet with this shit?

Come on, nostalgia is one thing, but that's just fucking stupid, you must be pulling my leg.

So I did some checking to see what other occurances of similar shit has been blocked:
212.69.245.89 "Nutscrape/9.0 (CP/M; 8-bit)"
212.197.17.177 "IE/6.01 (CP/M; 8-bit)"
82.159.197.251 "Nutscrape/1.0 (CP/M; 8-bit)"
195.228.115.1 "Nutscrape/1.0 (CP/M; 8-bit)"
84.56.234.101 Nutscrape/1.0 (CP/M; 8-bit)
82.69.177.201 Nutscrape/9.0 (CP/M; 8-bit)
212.219.82.36 Nutscrape/9.0 (CP/M; 8-bit)
Either this is someone's idea of a lame joke or there are some seriously twisted nerds out there that just won't let go of the past.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I may be able to shed some light over the Nutscrape mystery (at least partly):

You may have heard of the Squid proxy cache, which is widely used in both corporate and ISP networks (also for reverse proxying Apache). Squid has a wide range of configuration option to suit anybody's need and some of them can be used to anonymise or fake HTTP headers. One of these options is called
"fake_user_agent" and the example provided in the configuration file happens to be:

Nutscrape/1.0 (CP/M; 8-bit)

So in most cases this may be the result of someone sitting behind a squid proxy (or pretending to do so). This option, however, isn't activated by default, because it may cause problems with some uber web sites, which don't know how to handle browsers that don't match up against their if..else string comparisons.

HTH,
Olliver

Anonymous said...

I've seen three variations on this Squid user agent over the past few years:

Nutscrape/1.0 (CP/M; 8-bit)
Nutscrape/1.0 (CP/M; 8-bit;-)
Nutscrape

All the IP Addresses were located in Japan and Italy.

Thanks for further confirmation about the Squid user agent Olliver.

IncrediBILL said...

OK, I checked a sure enough a couple of these used a detectable proxy server, but not all.

1.0 netpilot.cathedralcentre.com:8000 (Squid/2.4.STABLE2+filter0.7)
1.0 cache1.seas.sk:3128 (squid/2.5.STABLE3)

Anonymous said...

This is the rest of my list of user agents I think belong to Squid:

Squid/2.4 (linux; 32-bit)
Squid-Prefetch

Anonymous said...

I remember those!
I think I've worked on a few before the 8088's and 286's came out.

What does it take to scrape one page?
A bowl of wheeties, a glass of orange juice and 8 hours to kill???

Somewhat like the old 300 baud days and dialup BBS's and the The Kermit protocol... :)) :))