America Online Browser

[w3bmastine]

Found a visitor from the past in my logs:

UA: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; America Online Browser 1.1; rev1.5; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.1)
Robots.txt: No
Protocol: HTTP/1.1
Host: AWS
NetRange: 54.176.0.0 - 54.191.255.255
CIDR: 54.176.0.0/12

[keyplyr]

It's a bot obviously :)

[w3bmastine]

Should I put such beasts in the Server Farms thread?

[keyplyr]

AWS has its own thread, [webmasterworld.com...] however browsers are spoofed all the time so its really not unique. I would imagine a large percentage of what you think are normal, human visits are actually bots.

<added>
Just noticed that the "Amazon AWS Hosts Bad Bots" thread has been automatically closed due to inactivity.

[edited by: keyplyr at 1:53 am (utc) on Apr 30, 2016]

[lucy24]

Gosh, that takes me back. At one time I had so many of them in spurious UAs that they were denied by name. But I just looked up and, while the UA still exists, it is 100% without exception used by referer spam, primarily from .ru, so we're in belt-and-suspenders territory.

Further detour to older logs reveals that I have never, ever-- i.e. since 2011-- met a human using any form of "America Online Browser". I'm also amused to find a bit of overlap with "FunWebProducts" (no spaces), which I dimly recall as meaning something like "no fun at all for anyone". (This recollection turns out to be wrong, since it also appears in humans, though none more recent than 2013.)

[tangor]

Even if they came it would be a 404 because this: "MSIE 6.0" is not allowed.

Life is too short and I have other things to do. But I am willing to be convinced to change that deny if there is any concrete evidence of benefit.