Dave2 Wickham's Journal: Odd User-Agent

Yesterday I was randomly grepping for stuff in AAG's logs (yes, it was late, I was bored) when I stumbled across the following, er, "odd" user-agent string (IP has been changed):

532.627.523.74 - - [17/Mar/2004:02:54:13 +0100] "GET /images/vme/vietnam-medevac1.png HTTP/1.0" 200 738469 www.allaboutgames.co.uk "http://www.allaboutgames.co.uk/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) but not really you fuckers. this is just to identify a known browser , you wont find out what im really using." "-"

Now why the hell are they identifying themselves as MSIE to every single site, bumping up MSIE usage statistics, if they're using something else?

Because....

[jawtheshark]

Some braindead sites deny access to non-IE browsers. Often sites that are considered important, like webbanking sites. :-(

I'm lucky, my bank even allows Mozilla on OS X... and it works, though it is not supported.

Re:Because....

[Dave2 Wickham]

Can't he just set his UA to something different for those individual sites? That's what I'd do...

Re:Because....

[jawtheshark]

Hmmm... he might be lazy? Or forgot to change it after visiting the annoying site? Who knows? Or he is using IE6 on NT5.1 and changed the User Agent (it's a simple registry key) and is just a whining poser....

Ive seen that myself...

[NeoThermic]

here are a few of the 'werider' UA's from my stats:
Universe/2.7_Isolated_(OS_ZZ.64.7_stable;_ Infinite _Worlds_6;_Quantum_Mechanical_Equipment_Corporatio n)
Space_Bison/0.02_[fu]_(Win67;_X;_SK)
0aplvatn erhxnegs0nlkmsQicv

Why run around with a weird UA though? There isn't much point now...

NeoThermic

Subject

[Tomble]

As others have pointed out, some gittish sites have a policy of locking out some of us with obscure browsers. Why this is is a mystery to me (perhaps they're just arseholes). Of course, there is the issue of blocking things like download managers, etc- at least once I've found I couldn't use wget to download files from a site without changing the User Agent data - but just setting it to "." worked IIRC...

As for why this person would choose that exact string, I imagine he just thought it'd be funny (but no,