Roku Developer Program

[adamh]

Mozilla/5.0 (QSP; Roku; AP; 2.8.1.132)

I am seeing a ton of these in a platform we run, and wondering if they are fraud or not?

Thanks - very little info in a general google search.

[sntpolanco]

What are you using to to view the user agent?

[tim_beynart]

the UA pattern I've always seen looks like this: Roku/DVP-8.0 (048.00E04143A)
Where the numbers following DVP are the firmware version.
Mozilla is almost certainly not going to be in a default Roku user agent, since the device has no browser.  Of course someone can set any value they want for the user agent in brightscript, though.

[sntpolanco]

Let’s connect via email.
Spolanco@freewheel.tv

I have some additional questions that can help us both.

Thanks
Santo Polanco
Inventory Quality Manager
FreeWheel | New York

[norcaljohnny]

"tim_beynart" wrote:
the UA pattern I've always seen looks like this: Roku/DVP-8.0 (048.00E04143A)
Where the numbers following DVP are the firmware version.
Mozilla is almost certainly not going to be in a default Roku user agent, since the device has no browser.  Of course someone can set any value they want for the user agent in brightscript, though.

You are right in that a user-agent can be spoofed but as a web developer a user-agent is normally used to present content IE CSS based on their browsers capabilities. 

You may have seen code based on this.
 For Chrome but Mostly Safari; 

-webkit

 for Firefox, 

-moz

 
for Opera, 

-o

for IE

-ms

Opera didnt even use a user-agent for quite some time and started using Mozilla/5.0 to avoid legacy server rules.

Then you have the bots such as Googlebot/2.1. Which one can write codes based on allowing indexing to specific bots or disallow them all together..
 
Email clients and many others apps have user-agents which are not browsers. Basically any communication between server/clients over http use user-agents and it is mostly for content and semantic reasons.

Spoofing your user-agent is usually used for the reasons not intended. 

And with that Roku does indeed use Mozilla/5.0 as well as ..
Mozilla/5.0 (QSP; Roku; UI; 5.3.0.49) 
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; U; NETFLIX)
Roku 3/7.0 (Roku, 4200X, Wireless) 
Roku/DVP-4.1
Roku/DVP-5.0
Roku/DVP-7.0.

[NB_]

"tim_beynart" wrote:
the UA pattern I've always seen looks like this: Roku/DVP-8.0 (048.00E04143A)
Where the numbers following DVP are the firmware version.

Correct, this is the user-agent header format that Roku SDK channels present.
But there is no guarantee in either direction, for example i suspect Netflix and YouTube on Roku present different agent - or an app on non-Roku device may have chosen to mention "Roku" in their user-agent, akin to how Chrome, IE and Safari claim to be "Mozilla" (something they aren't - but they do it for old web compatibility sake).

Bonus read: https://petercai.com/user-agent-is-not-security/
(pseudo-random result from googling "user-agent is not a security feature")