app:/EncycloPDF.swf - who/what is it?

Trying to do some detective work on a stats log. 43% of hits come from referrer app:/EncycloPDF.swf

A typical log entry is 178.146.205.174 - - [29/Jan/2011:23:50:37 -0800] "GET /filename.pdf HTTP/1.1" 200 86571 "app:/EncycloPDF.swf" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/531.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) AdobeAIR/2.5.1"

This one happens to be googlebot crawl-66-24开发者_开发问答9-67-204.googlebot.com but they are from all over the world.

The real question is whether someone is poaching content for some sort of app.

Can't find any reference to EncycloPDF.swf anywhere, but I bet someone here knows the answer.

Thanks in advance

I admit this is not an area in which I have a great deal of experience, so I may be completly wrong but it could be that requests are being made by flash content on a third party site.

It's also possible that the host making the request has an application or browser extension installed (EncycloPDF?) that added to the browser's User-Agent value to announce it's presence to servers in the same manner as Windows Media Centre, the .NET Framework and Silverlight do on Windows

For what it is worth weeks later, here's the answer. Someone had written and is selling an app that was stealing using PDF files from the site and including them in live views via the app.

This came to light after a person who bought the app, but also likes the free PDFs the site provides, noticed what was happening and reported it.

A little bit of editing to the .htaccess file and now every song file they load...well, they all get redirected to one PDF file that says something like "sorry, this material is being used without permission. You can get it for free from..."