Ask HN: Am I being advertised an ARG via user agent logs?
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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 ("Alternate Reality Game") and I'm the sap who's taken the bait?

Discussion (3 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game