Enlightening about Ripper browser :-)

[bella61]

I had my first visit from Ripper client. I checked it up and it was a friend of mine working at Ericsson (yes that big company). I could guess it was him since I send out a link by mail to several persons.

He is using the corporate default browser which actually is Internet Explorer. He do not know why it is identifying itself as Ripper - but it it was an innocent visit from an innocent user

Just wanted to share - I´ve seen others worrying here but those threads was closed.

/B

[tosommerfugle]

In this forum, someone else posted:

I have been told by my webhosting company, that the Rippers 0 browser is an employee web monitoring utility, used by large corporations and governments. This browser utility monitors employees activity while they are using the Internet with Internet Explorer, Firefox etc.

Of course, anyone can put "Rippers" in the user-agent header, but the above suggestion makes sense to what I've seen. Sometimes, large corporations like to play "big brother" ...

[bobby131313]

Sometimes, large corporations like to play "big brother" ...

Nothing "Big brother" about it at all. It's thier computer and thier connection, they're entitled to know what's going on.

I do subcontract work for an automotive group that owns 245 dealers across the country. Every internet connection for every computer in every building they own anywhere in the country goes through one central server in Ohio. They can see in real time what any port is doing. They can sit there and watch you in real time.

They have a customized IE browser and it's the only browser that will connect past the main hub. Every user on these connections would come up exactly the same in your stats including IP and a company assigned user agent that lots of people would likely would be here asking what the hell it is.

When they hire you, you sign a piece of paper giving up all your internet/computer privacy, if you don't sign it, you don't work for them.

[tosommerfugle]

They can sit there and watch you in real time.

Q.E.D. Big Brother!

[bella61]

I have also been told that companies use ripper for keeping their own caches of frequently read information. For example newsites and radio channels. To save bandwidth. It makes sense to me.

[lenny100]

I've seen this before, glad to know what it is. LOL @ big brother.

[mal138]

Thanks for the info. The name "rippers 0" certainly sounds like a web ripper/copier but this is the best first-hand report I've read.

I also use Google Analytics along with StatCounter. The visits that StatCounter report as Rippers 0 all show up in Google Analytics as IE 7 in the case of this particular IP.

The only weird thing in our case is that the traffic seems very automated. The traffic is every weekday over a very regular time period (typically about 1:30 am to 9:00 am), approximately every 15-30 minutes, and every entry includes two visits in rapid succession. (In fact the first hit doesn't even list an actual page, just "no referring link".) And most of the traffic is to our homepage.

The good news is that the traffic is from an ISP that we would expect would be visiting our site. The question is, why so much traffic (almost 3% of our site's traffic from a single IP address) on a daily basis?

[iamred]

I sometimes see 'Ripper 0' in combination with another browser like IE, often connecting at the exact same time. In one case I was able to work out what it was: someone using an internet by satellite provider. In this one case it was in the US, but I've seen the same pattern for a few connections from Australia - where satellite is used often in the outback.

What I think is happening is that their own little box is hitchhiking on their connection, using Ripper 0 to build a local cache, so fewer satellite connections will be needed making browsing faster.

Definitely not a matter of 'ripping' a whole site, all Ripper 0 connections are the same pages also requested by the normal browser in these cases.

[AndyBalholm]

I wrote a Perl script to automatically log me into the WiFi hotspot at the local library. In the administrator's display of who is logged in, my browser is listed as "Rippers." Since I'm using LibWWW-Perl to access the login page, my UserAgent string should be something like "libwww-perl/5.813". Apparently some servers assume that anyone using a Perl script to access them is a ripper.