what kind of browser is YComp 5.0??

sneakyimp

I installed osCommerce for someone and their activity log shows that they have many many many visits from a user agent with this stamp:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; YComp 5.0.

missing parentheses and trailing period are both from the device.

Is this a spider or robot? Is some clown trying to hack my site?

Tracer

It appears to be Internet Explorer from a Windows XP machine...

Follow this link

http://www.hixie.ch/tests/tesremas/listbrowsers.pl?sort=id

sneakyimp

that link is crashing my browser.

Weedpacket

Originally posted by sneakyimp
that link is crashing my browser.

Works for me; what browser are you using?

From a bit of Googling it looks like it means the client has Yahoo! Messenger installed.

Tracer

I was curious... So I googled it a bit more... Weedpacket appears to be correct... In that this displays with Internet Explorer is used alogn with Yahoo messenger... I thought the site was interesting in that Walt Disney has thier own version of IE... and it displays such in thier headers....

sneakyimp

ok...today it works. weird. thanks for the link. it's very helpful.

Anyways, it seems a bit odd to me that this particular type of browser--IE 6/ Windows NT 5.1/YComp 5--would outrank the next most common browser 6 to 1. The missing closed parenthesis also seems weird.

Could I be under attack or something? Or does everyone just have IE 6 with Yahoo toolbar installed? seems really strange to me. 18,000 hits out of 42,000 with that one exact browser, while the 2nd place user agent is

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)

with only 3000 hits.

Weedpacket

Originally posted by sneakyimp
The missing closed parenthesis also seems weird.

Probably just a logfile truncation; any longer user-agent strings?

Could I be under attack or something?

Without any information about distribution in time or IP space it's pretty hard to say.

Or does everyone just have IE 6 with Yahoo toolbar installed?

I'd only be half surprised if it turned out that the messenger thing changes the user agent string to read that on every client it's installed on - no matter what the reality is. That might be of interest to some Department with a Three-Letter Acronym. The link Tracer supplied doesn't really help here, as most of the cited user-agent strings were posted by morons; it is curious that they all refer to MSIE, despite the messenger thingy being available for other platforms.

sneakyimp

thanks, weedpacket...your 3-letter acronym quip was a little over my head (fcc? ftc? irs???).

i reckon i'll have to dig into the access log to find out more info. maybe i will import into a mySQL database for more analysis or something.... SELECT * FROM tblAccessLog WHERE user_agent LIKE "%Ycomp"

or something.

Weedpacket

Originally posted by sneakyimp
(fcc? ftc? irs???).

I dunno either, not being a US citizen. DoJ?

Tracer

I am American.....

DOJ (Department of Justice) would be a good start.....

Someone should really check this out thougth.... Weed makes an execellent point.. And I wouldn't put it past microsoft to do something like this....

I am also sort of suprised that thier is no main repository for browser ID tags or reverse lookup....

sneakyimp

i'm a bit confused still.

seems to me that the whole transgression here (if any) would have been by the person who wrote the yahoo toolbar code--not microsoft.

and, for what it's worth, the DoJ does appear to be moving (slowly) against spyware/nuisance developers.