humanoid Chrome

[lucy24]

How can you tell this is a robot?

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36

That was not a rhetorical question. I've just discovered that every single visit with this UA string, ever (since mid-February), has been a robot, most from known blocked ranges.

Wait, did I say February? On each of two sites there was a lone HEAD request in December with the same UA.

Was it ever used by humans? If not, what's the "This Is A Robot" giveaway?

[dstiles]

Should there not be a "compatible" in there?

[lucy24]

:: detour to raw logs with search for " 200 .+Chrome/41" ::

Human (just the first three that came up):

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.101 Safari/537.36

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.101 Safari/537.36

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.118 Safari/537.36

Cross-checking reveals that the overwhelming majority of humans-- though not 100% all-- are 2272.something. But so are a significant minority of robots.

"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible" seems to be a characteristic of newish MSIE as well as many legitimate robots including the major search engines. I don't think webkit ever uses it; the combination "compatible" and "Safari" shows up almost exclusively in requests that were blocked on other grounds. Some of those even managed to misplace "compatible", putting it after the putative OS instead.

[keyplyr]

what's the "This Is A Robot" giveaway?

No sense of humor?

[lucy24]

:-P