Asura

Asura is a personal AI assistant operated by Dave Nicoll. If you see Asura in your logs, a single person asked an assistant to look at a specific page.

What it does

• Fetches pages only when the operator asks for them, as part of a conversation. One request per page.
• Does not crawl, spider, or follow links on its own.
• Does not use fetched content to train AI models, and does not resell or republish it.

How it behaves

• Obeys robots.txt for the product token Asura (falls back to *), including Crawl-delay.
• Rate-limited: at most one request per second per host, slower if Crawl-delay asks for it.
• GET requests only.

Identification

User-Agent: Asura/1.0 (+https://davenicoll.com/bots/asura)

Every request is cryptographically signed using Web Bot Auth (HTTP Message Signatures, RFC 9421). Requests carry a Signature-Agent: "https://davenicoll.com" header. The public keys are published at /.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory. Requests that claim to be Asura without a valid signature are not from Asura.

Contact

Questions or opt-out requests: d.nicoll@gmail.com. You can also block it in robots.txt:

User-agent: Asura
Disallow: /