I've also noticed something in my logs that is stupidly requesting these 'apple-touch.png' icons over and over thousands of times. It seems to discover links from HN. Even if you create a file with that name, it will just keep requesting it over and over.
I saw something like this once where a shitty app was using some of the iPhone icons, but it was proxying them all without any caching.
So if 10 people would load the app, their backend would make 10 requests to the icon on my server and then would relay those images to each user.
I could see something like this happening with a "push" system so when something new is posted on HN some overly clever dev decided to push the icon and title to each device to be read later but forgot to cache the icon so they end up slamming the server.
