What is the Amazon/Kindle UA?

[incrediBILL]

I think I have a clue to some of the activity coming from Amazon's AWS which I gleaned from the new Kindle 2 specs on Amazon.

Unlike reading blogs on your PC, Kindle blogs are downloaded onto Kindle so you can read them even when you're not wirelessly connected. And unlike RSS readers which often only provide headlines, blogs on Kindle give you full text content and images, and are updated wirelessly throughout the day.

This possibly explains some of the behaviors regarding AWS and RSS feeds but short of actually buying a Kindle I have no way to attempt to validate a Kindle crawling a site vs. all the rest of the junk using AWS.

Any ideas?

[bcolflesh]

From here:

[tumblelog.marco.org...]

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Linux 2.6.10) NetFront/3.3 Kindle/1.0 (screen 600x800)

- the one I used definitely passed NetFront, but I don't remember Kindle being in the string - maybe it was added in an update.

[incrediBILL]

Kindle does appear to have some browsing capability but the Amazon description of the RSS feed reader sounds like Amazon collects the feed content and redistributes it.

The part I'm interested in is the "unlike RSS readers which often only provide headlines, blogs on Kindle give you full text content and images" which sounds like they're possibly stepping off the the RSS feed to collect more than the author allows in the feed.

That's what I'm looking to find.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 5:58 pm (utc) on Feb. 23, 2009]

[bcolflesh]

Sorry - misunderstood. I'll see if I can get some time with it again this week.

[Pfui]

This just in. Literally. Wonder why Amazon would cloak its host/name? (Let alone use Level 3 when it has a gazillion of its own server farms.)

8.18.145.23n
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Linux 2.6.22) NetFront/3.4 Kindle/2.0 (screen 600x800)

robots.txt? NO

(Level 3: 8.0.0.0 - 8.255.255.255; 8.0.0.0/8)

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FYI: The app/bot/hybrid/whatever was redirected to a page on a private server (where I send all of Level 3, etc.), took the redirection, and hit the private server -- also no robots.txt -- but .html only (minus the page's graphic and .js; so bot-typical). Minutes later, the whatever was back, but only to the private server, and only requesting plain .html again.

Public Server:

03/28 21:12:36

Private Server:

03/28 21:12:37
03/28 21:16:04

---
FWIW: Found while poking around neighboring L3 IPs, a Amazon-claimed hostname:

kindle-user.whispernet.com
8.18.145.25n

[edited by: Pfui at 7:17 am (utc) on Mar. 29, 2009]