Prometheus 6

Sorry, y'all may not care about this but I do, and it's Independence Day, right?

How to beat AVG's fake traffic spew
A header to save the internet
By Cade Metz in San Francisco
Published Wednesday 2nd July 2008 05:20 GMT

Bundled with AVG's newest anti-virus engine, AVG 8, and used by roughly 20 million people worldwide, LinkScanner checks search engine results for malware before you on click them. If you type a keyword into Google, for instance, it automatically visits each address that appears on Google's results page.

This has caused an enormous spike in traffic on sites across the web, including The Register, and many webmasters may not realize where these hits are coming from. Hoping to fool malware writers, LinkScanner mimics real live human clicks. At least in part.

When scanning pages, LinkScanner employs the IP addresses of those 20 million people who use the product, and as of last week, it sends the same user agent as Microsoft's IE6 browser.