Thursday, February 14, 2008

MSIE 7 on Livebot IPs

Not sure what this means but I spotted an MSIE 7.0 user agent on the following Livebot IP addresses.

Here's the exact agent used:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Here's the IPs involved:
65.55.165.119 [livebot-65-55-165-119.search.live.com.]
65.55.165.38 [livebot-65-55-165-38.search.live.com.]
65.55.165.53 [livebot-65-55-165-53.search.live.com.]
65.55.165.66 [livebot-65-55-165-66.search.live.com.]
65.55.165.96 [livebot-65-55-165-96.search.live.com.]
Could mean anything from Live testing who has rigid user agent checking to making screen shots or they're reusing those IPs for other internal purposes, hard to say.

What's not hard to say is that those IPs with that user agent got automatically blocked on my site for being the wrong thing in the wrong place.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Silly. That might easily have been a human being surfing from work. And before you say you don't mind blocking someone who was goofing off at work, consider that they might not have been goofing off. A purchaser researching your bot blocker, perhaps. In other words, a prospective customer.

Of course, having been blocked, they probably aren't one anymore.

Not that they likely want an *overzealous* bot blocker anyway.

:)

IncrediBILL said...

It's very unlikely there's someone 'surfing at work' using IPs dedicated to a LiveBot search engine.

See, that's why Microsoft installed that reverse DNS thing that identifies that IP as a Livebot IP so we can validate specific accesses as belonging to their robot or perhaps you missed that little factoid in your rush to sound silly.

Microsoft has other IPs dedicated for the purpose of their employees just surfing around.

However, if it was a prospective customer looking for a top security product they found out it was a truly hardened security product and probably went "Daaaaaamn!"

Anonymous said...

In that specific case, the IPs might be earmarked specifically for bots by the company using them. More generally, though, just because traffic is originating from a place of business won't reliably indicate that it's *automated* traffic, or if it isn't that it's someone goofing off.

IncrediBILL said...

Been doing this for a long time and telling the difference between a data center of non-humans and actual business office with humans isn't hard.

Anonymous said...

Suuuure...

IncrediBILL said...

If you don't believe it, piss off.

Berni said...

Har har, human being.... it's still MSN faking the UA to circumvent sites that block according the UA. A human being wouldn't ask for robots.txt which this MSN thing did on my site.