Sonic the robot

[lucy24]

IP: 133.9.84.abc (page says “...221.22 and ..84.100-116” but I think I've always met them from ..84.100)
UA: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YamanaLab-Robot/1.0 (Sonic/1.0); http://www.yama.info.waseda.ac.jp/~crawler/info.html)

formerly seen from the identical IP with slightly different

UA: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Sonic/1.0; http://www.yama.info.waseda.ac.jp/~crawler/info.html)

Your basic well-mannered Japanese robot of unknown purpose. Page is in Japanese but links to English-language version.

Along with the minor name change--apparently dating back a few weeks--the new version has significantly different headers; that's what caught my attention.

[keyplyr]

Yamana Lab [yama.info.waseda.ac.jp] is the CS dept of Waseda University. As such, a lot of student bot projects test and waste bandwidth. I've always blocked these IP ranges, but watch for anything significant that may be beneficial.

[lucy24]

I'm not much bothered by robots consuming bandwidth, if only because the real offenders are blatantly malign and can be blocked on those grounds alone.
<rant>
The bandwidth-gobblers that have really started to exasperate me are the humans from {geographic region redacted} requesting ebooks arising from searches where any idiot could see I don't have what they are looking for. (Do they simply not comprehend the purpose of the search snippet?) And, being human, the request includes vast numbers of supporting files which all get downloaded in the time it takes the human to figure out they've come to the wrong place. So I cold-bloodedly redirect them to an "oops" page from which, if they have functioning brain cells, they can click a further link and be taken to their originally requested page if they're sure they want it. And if they don't have sufficient grasp of English to understand that's what the page says, well, then they certainly didn't want that other page in the first place.

And if they did want that other page, it was a “Do my homework for me” search, so tough beans either way.
</rant>

[keyplyr]

Well that'll show them!