DeeCee - 6:49 pm on Feb 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

Yes, Pfui

I think you summed that up nicely. :)
Matches perfectly. Twitter swarmers are some of the most brain-dead bots out there. They reflect the same level as intelligence as the "sites" that send out the swarm.

Personally I finally got to the conclusion that nothing good ever reaches out from Amazon EC2, and added whole Amazon owned CIDR ranges to block lists.
Amazon really need to start watching what their customers do from there. Also symptomatic is that quite a few content scrapers coming from there show up using Russian versions of various user agent-strings. They do not even bother hiding WHAT they are; they merely try to hide WHO they are with a cheap account in the EC2 cloud.