Ask HN: Am I being advertised an ARG via user agent logs?

SpecialistK1 pts0 comments

I m here looking through logs on my unnamed reverse proxy and CDN service. The crawler bot swarm has been hitting my PHP application like I ve upset them so I m seeing which weird user agent strings are being allowed to connect. There s Sogou and meta-webindexer and a small number of requests from SleepBot/1.0 What s SleepBot?The ASN is Google and the UA string is: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; SleepBot/1.0; +http //sleepbot com/) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 [edited to make link non-clickable]So I visit the site. And it looks like the homepage of an interesting tech and ambient music guy who is still running a Shoutcast online radio stream but otherwise hasn t been seen online in 5 years. The Wayback Machine shows few changes in over a decade. But the resume link brings up a GitHub account with a different URL and username which reported 1 issue in March of this year. It goes deeper.What s going on? Is a Google or adjacent employee running a personal scraper or just custom UA string while browsing the web? Did someone make a typo? Or is it some kind of weird security game / ARG and I m the sap who s taken the bait?

quot sleepbot like user agent logs

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