Thursday, June 28, 2007

Dear Amazon AWS Group Part Deux

Back in November I wrote an open letter to the Amazon AWS Group about trying to get them to stop using the default user agent "Java/1.5.0_09".

Today I noticed that they gave me a clear response to my open request:

216.182.228.223 [domU-12-31-33-00-02-01.usma1.compute.amazonaws.com.]
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; T312461) Java/1.5.0_09"
Oh yes, prefixing "Java/1.5.0_09" with an MSIE 6.0 user agent is MUCH better.... NOT!

Must've been getting blocked from crawling too many sites that block the default Java UA.

Nice try guys, but that's really fucking lame.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I kicked amazonaws.com to the curb a While back..
Here's one:

ec2-72-44-51-181.z-1.compute-1.amazonaws.com

and it's user agent is this:
Agent: LeapTag (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://beta.leaptag.com/?p=linux2&v=0.8.4.trunk.r4295)
It used that to pull the robots.txt file and then used this to "try" to pull an article:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.8) Gecko/20061025 Firefox/1.5.0.8

So,,,,, I don't believe it's a legit bot/user or whatever coming from amazonaws.com.
It changes as it sees fit to scrape whatever it's looking for..