Re: revenue sharing agreement with DuckDuckGo
Dear Paul,
On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 10:27:05AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 9:56 AM, Kumar Appaiah wrote:
>
> > The current default for some browsers in Debian informs webmasters
> > about which browser is being used.
>
> I think you mean "all browsers" rather than "some browsers"? Are there
> actually browsers that do not send the User-Agent HTTP header by
> default? I'm using xul-ext-useragentswitcher to disable sending the
> User-Agent header but I doubt any browsers will ever do that by
> default.
Ah, I miswrote. What I meant was, that if you use vanilla Iceweasel,
you can already tell that that hit was from a Debian machine. You do
need a user-agent swticher (or equivalent), as you rightly say, to
switch what is sent as user-agent.
> > The user can, naturally, change it
> > to suit his/her needs. How does merely using this string to track hits
> > to DDG (with no changes to the default user-agent) change anything for
> > the user? They can track us anyway, right now, right?
>
> Probably you missed the part of the email that says we should add
> t=debian by default to every new DDG search URL? I would suggest that
> it should be up to the users what t= should be set to when sending
> search requests to DDG, not Debian.
Currently, if I use Iceweasel to search on Google using it's default
home page, it appends a "client=iceweasel-a". Do you imply that this
setting should be reverted?
> If DDG wants to donate money to Debian based on User-Agent then great,
> but I don't see how they can do that yet, given that many browsers in
> Debian probably don't mention Debian in User-Agent. Of the ones I
> tested, only elinks and epiphany-browser do that.
In other words, are you not strictly opposed to them looking for these
strings and finding them, but it should be up to the user to decide
whether or not they would like these strings identifying Debian to be
sent. Is that correct?
Thank you for clarifying.
Kumar
--
Ooh, mommy, mommy, what I have now doesn't work in this extremely
unlikely circumstance, so I'll just throw it away and write something
completely new.
-- Linus Torvalds
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