Odd Web Traffic

Looking at my web stats I noticed a lot of downloads. While normally this would be a good thing there was something suspicious about the hits.

The rest of the site traffic was normal.

Many were multiple requests from the same addresses.

Many of the sessions went straight to the download without looking at any other pages.

The user-agent was “CFNetwork”

They were HEAD requests (so they weren’t really downloads).

Through some digging and poking around, I realized it was AppFresh. For those who don’t know, AppFresh is a program that basically is Apple’s Software Update for non-Apple software. It uses various mechanisms to figure out how to check on the latest version of your app. I’m glad someone decided to take this on and I’m interested to see how it progresses. Nonetheless, it’s prerelease and has a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out (such as not setting the user-agent so us devs could figure out what was happening). The developers seem responsive though so feel free to drop them a line.

The point of all this is that there are other devs that are just as confused or alarmed as I was about the traffic. Hopefully this will save some time and effort in trying to investigate this. This also fulfills my public service requirement for my PWI (Programming While Intoxicated) conviction last year.

On a side note, the topic of HEAD requests opens up a whole slew of lewd titles that I could have used for this post. Feel free to laud or chastise me for my restraint or sheepishness.

[Update: Just got a note from the AppFresh guys indicating they’ve released Preview 3 which now sets the user-agent, among other things. The quick turnaround is quite commendable. ]