Weird series of web requests

IPv4 address 35.211.226.190 requested the URL /posts/dfuds/ from my blog’s web server 841 times between 2026-01-16 and 2026-03-10, approximately once every 45 minutes.

Currently (2026-03-23), 35.211.226.190 is in a Google Cloud address range, 35.208.0.0/12, allocated to Google since at least 2017-09-29.

DFUDS post on lobste.rs

The computer science oriented link aggregator lobste.rs, posted a link to my blog post about Depth-first Unary Degree Sequence representations of multi-trees. Lobste.rs posted at 2026-01-15T17:04:55, I think that’s Mountain Standard Time, -0600 timezone.

Due to vanity, I checked how many HTTP requests for the web page had a lobste.rs referrer every few days. I noted that 35.211.226.190 was retrieving my blog post every hour or so because every single GET had a referrer of https://lobste.rs/.

Log file entries

Less than 8 hours after lobste.rs linked to my post, 35.211.226.190 started retrieving it regularly. Retrievals continued for 53 days. /dfuds/ is the only URL it retrieved.

The first and last “combined” format Apache HTTP server log file lines:

35.211.226.190 - - [16/Jan/2026:00:51:52 +0000] "GET /posts/dfuds/ HTTP/1.1" 200 8247 "https://lobste.rs/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/105.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
35.211.226.190 - - [10/Mar/2026:18:13:42 +0000] "GET /posts/dfuds/ HTTP/1.1" 200 12649 "https://lobste.rs/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/105.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Some time between 06/Feb/2026T01:12:50 +0000 and 06/Feb/2026T03:12:26 +0000 I changed my Apache server config to give any request from 35.211.226.190 to my infinite fake website program. For about half the requests, 35.211.226.190 got some never-the-same-twice random binary bytes instead of HTML.

Statistical characterization of log file timestamps

35.211.226.190 retrieved my post 841 times. There are 840 intervals between requests.
Mean interval, seconds 5526
Minimum interval, seconds 107
1st quartile 2742
Median interval, seconds 5350
3rd quartile 8131
Maximum interval, seconds 11549

The median interval between requests is almost exactly 90 minutes, which is 5400 seconds.

Inter-request interval histogram

histogram distribution of inter-request interval

This almost looks like a uniform distribution. The only thing that makes me think it isn’t uniform is tailing off on high and low ends. A uniform distribution has high and low counts in all buckets across the range of a histogram.