I’m quite certain that someone at Apple is having a really jolly laugh at MacRumors and MacShrine’s expense. MacRumors reported they’ve been visited by an iPhone (based upon a browser agent string), which was quickly followed by MacShrine.
One reader tipped us off that they had come across iPhone browser identification strings in the Apache logs of their eBay images. According to their submitted logs, the browser identifies itself as:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3
While browser identification strings can be easily spoofed, these requests originated from Apple’s internal IP addresses.
Easily, he says. Easily. It’s less than easy. Safari has the capability built in. Given, it doesn’t currently have an option for the iPhone (yet), but it’s there. The more geeky among you may already know that you can set this string with an argument to curl (the fabulous command line download utility).
I can just see it now. There’s an Apple software engineer sitting at his desk, feet up, looking at his Cinema Display laughing as he reads the headlines on both sites, saying “n00bs” under his breath.
N00bs indeed.
Open Terminal and type in the following:
curl http://www.macuser.com -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3'
Actually, I think the idea that a couple guys in Cuppertino are testing web browsing on the iPhone 3 weeks before the scheduled launch is not too preposterous. Is there a chance that this is a hoax? Of course, but there is an equally good chance that it is not. Your blindly assuming that it is impossible that this is legit strikes me as a little odd, to be honest.
What I actually find the most amazing is how condescending your post is, when at the same time, you use the jargon of a 15-year old wannabe hacker. N00bs? Please.