When you visit a web site, your web browser tells the server what browser it is. That identifier is called the useragent string. So when I visit a web site, the log file notes that this kind of browser stopped by:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050223 Firefox/1.0.1
Many sites test for certain kinds of browsers, and block all but their favorites. This lead developers to allow some browsers to lie about what kind of browser they are. If your favorite site only allows MSIE, you can make your Firefox SAY it’s MSIE, and you can get in.
Once the door was open for people to create their own useragent strings, all sorts of things started appearing. Firefox even has an extension to create a random humerous one every time you visit a new site.
When a large number of people all change it to the same thing though, spidey senses start to tingle. Is that a virus or worm leaving its mark? Today a sysadmin named Adam Sacarny found a new useragent string, used by a lot of traffic.
no.: reqs: pages: browser
---: -------: ------: -------
20: 246: 246: Jesus is the only way to God.
