User-agents get longer and.

[dstiles]

Just got a user-agent to end all UAs - I hope!

5367 characters / 250 words.

It began well enough with:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; FunWebProducts;

I say well enough: funwebproducts is a bad sign to begin with. It ended with:

customie8)

No comment.

There were 214 numeric variations on the basic stem SearchSystem - eg SearchSystem1039995106; of which 106 were duplicated. The term SearchSystem itself triggered a ban; it seemed to get the message because it didn't appear again.

No idea what SearchSystem is but one google result suggested an up/downloader with UA spoofing.

Interspersed at various intervals amongst the SearchSystem terms were three variants on the usual .NET CLR plus a GTB6 and the three terms:

desktopsmiley_3_1_6574227147131586_44_43;
DS_desktopsmiley;
FBSMTWB;

desktopsmiley is rated as a computer threat by Norton's safeweb. I have no idea what FBSMTWB is but it appears in firefox UAs as well.

The hit came from a common UK domestic broadband IP.

[jdMorgan]

Sounds like a 'Free download addict' visited... These folks just can't resist anything free -- even if it's useless!
Not so worried about them, but Microsoft's penchant for continuously adding more and more .NET runtime library versions is worrisome... It's about time for them to do a 'roll-up' and quit it with the old versions, or these need to be 'taken offline' into a set of proprietary sever/client headers if it's really necessary to negotiate the CLR version...

Anyway, 5367 characters has got to be some kind of record -- I've never seen even half of that! Too bad there's not a prize! -- Guinness Book maybe?

Jim

[dstiles]

Guinness bottle, maybe. :)

I try not to kill to many freebie addins but I do monitor or kill download-intensifiers.

Are you sure MS know how to rebuild the UA? My impression is they know just enough to stuff more garbage into it. :(