Yahoo blank UA

Is it really mobiles?

[dstiles]

I'm getting several hits per day along the lines of:

IP: 68.142.243.nnn
rDNS: ycar5.mobile.re3.yahoo.com
UA: blank
Headers: none
Referer: none

This has been going on for a few months now. All accesses are blocked with a 405 or 403 because of the stupid access codes. I log known mobile UAs and unknown UAs and I have no other entries for the IP range 68.142.24n.nnn.

Does anyone have experience of this? Is it really someone using a mobile through yahoo's IP range?

[keyplyr]

I allow blank UAs from this C range, always have. Can't remember any definitive research because I added the range to my whitelist a couple years before threats became so tricky. But so far I've not seen any negative outcome. Hits from this range are usually just root requests anyway, so I figured they were mobile index verifications (link checking.)

[edit reason - fix typo]

[edited by: keyplyr at 11:47 pm (utc) on Jan. 14, 2010]

[wilderness]

Blanks UA's from anybody been denied from my sites for more than ten years, inccluding this one (FYI) which has been been going on for months.

[Pfui]

Ditto, wilderness. Just because something's coming from .yahoo.com/.net/etc. doesn't mean it's benign, or even officially connected to Yahoo. Here's an earlier thread where a non-mobile UA came in via a mobile.re2.yahoo.net server:

Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00) Novarra-Vision/7.3
More crap from Yahoo?
[webmasterworld.com...]

And FWIW, in a variation on the Yahoo (not mobile) server theme, here's a curious trio o' hits to two files:

proxy1.search.sp1.yahoo.net [21:09:33] file A
proxy2.search.sp1.yahoo.net [21:56:48] file B
proxy2.search.sp1.yahoo.net [21:56:49] file A

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; OfficeLiveConnector.1.3; OfficeLivePatch.0.0; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; yie8

robots.txt? NO
referers? None

Probably some innocent someone using Yahoo's search, right? Well, I'm not so sure... the requests were all HEADs.

[dstiles]

Pfui, I notice that UA has no closing parenthesis. I've been seeing several of these recently, all MSIE and at least several including OfficeLive. I know at least some are from "real" people because one of them complained about being blocked. Admittedly none came via Yahoo IPs.

I'm not sure how searching yahoo can end up hitting a site through their proxies. Can this happen? I have little experience of using yahoo for searching.

On the other hand I can see yahoo (or any other SE) offering to pick up a standard web page and modify it to a mobile format, but not being a mobile user again I have no experience of this. Hence my original question.

[Pfui]

(Good spotting on the missing close paren w/ that UA. I missed that in all of its mess:)

Yahoo-wise...

More and more with the majors, and always with the minors, I never presume to know what they're doing. Neither can I count on what they say their bots are doing, or not doing, because our many, many actual sightings here routinely contradict official statements.

Point is, watch Yahoo server-hosted accesses on your site(s). If more iffy than not, send to a page telling real people how to get in touch with you (if you don't already). And if not okay? 403. There are in-between hoops you can have them jump through, of course, and you can always check Yahoo's "Site Explorer" section --

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

-- and see what settings are ostensibly applied to your sites.

Beyond that? For me, life's too short. They either do what they say, and/or what I say, or they get to go away.