Started to get this message when accessing Reddit. I use LibreWolf as a browser, which does indeed provide a more generic user agent to combat fingerprinting, but nothing out of the ordinary either (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0). Anyone else experiencing this?
Edit: seems to have resolved itself. Thanks for confirming I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Let’s hope this isn’t some new algorithm to test if for insufficient fingerprinting so Reddit can kick ad-resistant users.
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Let’s hope this isn’t some new algorithm to test if for insufficient fingerprinting so Reddit can kick ad-resistant users.
Oh, it is. I assure you. Anything but lose ad revenue.
Let’s hope this isn’t some new algorithm to test if for insufficient fingerprinting so Reddit can kick ad-resistant users.
Why hope that? That’s exactly what it is. If anything we should encourage shit like that so the site can crash and burn even more. They deserve nothing. It’s too bad many of the subreddit blackouts only lasted 48 hours, and even worse people gave up and went back to reddit.
Let’s hope they do something really crazy and start requiring ID for all users so more people will get fed up and leave.
But they don’t care at all about bots.
I’ve got Hermit setup for /r/CombatFootage and it’s still loading fine.
I’ve got a custom user agent (‘mobile’) and I block everything that I can.
I would strongly discourage changing your user agent to anything no standard. Doing that makes you extremely easy to spot in a data set
What’s a user agent?
Little descriptor your browser has to tell websites what it is and where it comes from
It also tells the website the OS you’re running, as well as the browser, and various version numbers of stuff.
One interesting experiment is to use a user agent changer to view a website, and watch how the website changes every time you load a new user agent.
Google will remove search options if you’re using Firefox (mobile?), for example. But if you change your user agent to say you have Chrome, even if you are actually using Firefox, those options magically come back and work. It’s almost as if that’s anti-competitive behavior or something…
It’s also how a lot of websites know whether or not to give you Windows executables or Mac executables, or Linux executables, etc.
It also tells the website the OS you’re running, as well as the browser, and various version numbers of stuff
While it’s true that many browsers choose to follow a convention that includes that info,
User-Agentis just a string, so something likefukuis a legitimate UAhttps://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1945#section-10.15
curl -vA fuku example.com 2>&1 | grep -E '^[<>] (User|HTTP)'
they’re trying to limit automated scrap or the like. avoid that domain as much as you can
