Re: [Edbrowse-dev] user agent spoofing

[Chris Brannon <chris@the-brannons.com>]

Kevin Carhart <kevin@carhart.net> writes:

> In addition to reading the settable user agent string, they test
> hundreds of things over javascript, and create a unique hash based on
> the answers.

Well, this is true.  But spoofing the user-agent header is still often
quite effective.  There are sites out there that block edbrowse for no
good reason.  I seem to remember that in the past an example was
kpfa.org or kpfk.org, don't remember which one, but it was one of the
Pacifica stations.  They fixed this at some point.
But spoofing user-agent turned a 403 to a 200.
There are other sites that autoblock edbrowse; I find them from time to
time.  They don't autoblock lynx.  So I wonder, is someone using
edbrowse for "questionable" purposes?  Five will get you ten that they
are.  It's also possible that someone has preemptively added edbrowse to
some sort of list or lists of "browsers that should be blocked", after
deciding that it had a possibility of "mis-use".  Let's not kid
ourselves here; I'm sure there are those who consider edbrowse highly
subversive.

-- Chris