Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00) Novarra-Vision/7.3

More crap from Yahoo?

[GaryK]

Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00) Novarra-Vision/7.3
8.12.144.17
cach2.nov.mobile.re2.yahoo.net

I know Novarra is what Yahoo! uses to push content to mobile platforms. It's a browser of sorts. I have no problem with that. Except in this case the pattern of files taken was that of a bot, not a human. Started with robots.txt and then crawled every folder and page in order; even disallowed ones. So I guess I'm confused and just wondering if anyone else has seen this and been suspicious that the user agent is just a spoof for a bot.

[keyplyr]

I've been seeing PlayStation (and other versions) for a couple years. Often times users browse websites from their game unit.

My guess would be it is a bot or DL tool and the user has spoofed the UA.

Next guess would be it is the provider replenishing their cache.

[GaryK]

Thanks. I can't decide whether to put this under the Playstation parent in browscap.ini or in my banned agents file that people use with ISAPI_Rewrite to block bad bots.

[keyplyr]

Since the IP range is that of Yahoo LVLT-YHOO, I think my second assertion is more accurate.

cach2.nov.mobile.re2.yahoo.net has been documented to request whatever they want, ignoring robots.txt when it comes to updating their cache. The thinking would be it's not really a robot.

[jdMorgan]

You might want to check for an X-Moz: Prefetch header and profile the Accept headers on a real PSP versus the ones used in this session.

Jim

[GaryK]

Thanks keyplyr.

Jim, I do capture that data, but I send it to Owen for processing. He'll have the data for the one that visited me last week. I can get the data from a real one by asking my nephew to do a little browsing on one of my sites for me. Thanks for the suggestion.