AVG Fakes User Agent, Floods the Internet

Slimy anti-virus provider AVG is spamming the internet with deceptive traffic pretending to be Internet Explorer. Essentially, users of the software automatically pre-crawl search results, which is bad, but they do so with an intentionally generic user agent. This is flooding websites with meaningless traffic (on Slashdot, we're seeing them as like 6% of our page traffic now). Best of all, they change their UA to avoid being filtered by websites who are seeing massive increases in bandwidth from worthless robots.

Comments

Ditto

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

I did the same thing as it was definitely running slower, and now I too have an exclamation point on my icon. Whoever thought up that part of the software is an idiot.