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.

  • Wes_Dev@lemmy.ml
    0·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • TunaCowboy@lemmy.world
      1·
      8 months ago

      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-Agent is just a string, so something like fuku is a legitimate UA

      https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1945#section-10.15

      curl -vA fuku example.com 2>&1 | grep -E '^[<>] (User|HTTP)'