Thanks, I appreciate your effort but there really isn't any need to explain this to me. I understood the parent comment this way too (i.e. as a snide remark trying way too hard to be funny in the worst possible, low effort, Reddit kind of way).

It's just that since it's rare to see this kind of response here, I was wondering if the author was trying to make any finer point, although admittedly that was unlikely to begin with.

> Basically, you were asking for some kind of elaborate meaning to a random image downloaded by a random app [...]

Basically, since they already traced the culprit with a lot of effort (as opposed to just blocking the request URL/UA string pair, which was also an option), the logical ultimate step to conclude their investigation should be to see what the code does, especially considering it's trivial to do so.

While I would not expect to discover any "elaborate meaning" behind it, and never claimed anything like that, I certainly think it would be prudent to check what was going on if I had to decide what to do about it next. For example, it could have been intended as some proxy/filtering/DPI check. I've also seen similar stuff before incorporated into some custom Android builds to generate fake ad traffic.

It really beggars belief that on a website called _Hacker_ News it's necessary to explain why sometimes it's worth it to be curious to people who themselves were curious enough to read this story and the associated comments but then halfway through decided their curiosity was satisfied and thus nobody else should be asking any more questions either (to be clear, I'm referring to the parent commenter here).