AppleNewsBot

[lucy24]

I'm pretty sure this is (a) unrelated to the Applebot (crawls from a different part of 17) and (b) brand-new.

17.133.8.37 - - [15/Apr/2016:15:12:30 -0700] "GET /directory/subdir/ HTTP/1.1" 403 1817 "-" "AppleNewsBot" 
17.133.8.37 - - [15/Apr/2016:15:12:53 -0700] "GET /directory/subdir/ HTTP/1.1" 403 1817 "-" "AppleNewsBot" 
17.133.8.37 - - [15/Apr/2016:15:13:14 -0700] "GET /directory/subdir/ HTTP/1.1" 403 1817 "-" "AppleNewsBot" 
17.133.8.37 - - [15/Apr/2016:15:13:25 -0700] "GET /directory/subdir/ HTTP/1.1" 403 1817 "-" "AppleNewsBot" 

They've been back since then from a similar IP, and are obviously trying hard to get in-- but not hard enough to ask for robots.txt. Timing of the first request tell me they heard about the page through a particular RSS feed, but I've never seen them before (other robots have followed the same pattern in the same directory since last summer).

I thought of excluding them by name, just to see if they're looking over the Applebot's shoulder in robots.txt, but it turns out the Applebot itself hasn't been around since last month. Search at apple dot com turns up nothing. (This is, ahem, not dispositive, based on past attempts with this site's search.)

[keyplyr]

I visualize Tim Cook walking on stage, both hands extended, introducing... "AppleNewsBot"