PrintFriendly

[lucy24]

IP: 35.187.51 (AWS, and all visits to date have used the identical aa.bb.cc.dd)
UA: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.81 Safari/537.36 PrintFriendly.com
Requests: all images (only) associated with a given page
Referer: the page the images “belong” to

Paradoxically the only reason I noticed this UA is that it lives in a blocked range; usually I don't pay much attention to image requests. Retroactive search through logs finds its first appearance in July.

I suppose it's a human tool, but the IP and UA belong to the thing itself, not to the human user.

[keyplyr]

Yup, a thief. I've had the UA blocked for a very long time (and the AWS range.)

A lot of scrapers are after images, but this also turns pages into PDF. I've had a lot of trouble with that. People like to PDF my articles and plagiarize them as their own.

I think the user "saves" the image or page to the PrintFriendly cloud (at AWS) where they then have access to it.

[lucy24]

this also turns pages into PDF

Oh. Oops. Er... Is this something That Other Platform doesn't do natively? I must have missed a chapter.

Memo to self: Add @media rule to global CSS to suppress display of p.toplink when printing. Ugh, that was ugly.

[keyplyr]

Well Windows will save as PDF just like Mac does, but I block those natively, so...