On Fri, Sep 22, 2000 at 01:28:58AM +1100, caffeine (caffeine@mindrape.org) wrote: > > In other words, the user-agent is mangled by junkbuster to be Mozilla > > 3.0 for Macintosh. I noticed this when my friend wanted to check her > > hotmail account on my linux box and hotmail complained about > > an old browser version (although it would probably also explain some > > problems I've had with other sites). <...> > > Shouldn't this be debianized to some reasonable default (like ".", > > which passes the user-agent string through unchanged), or am I missing > > something here? -chris > > With junkbuster making everybody look like they are running a Netscape 3 on a > Macintosh, nobody knows you are running Mozilla on a solaris box, or wget on a > Cray, or lynx on a hp300. You might argue that you couldn't care less if > people find out what exact browser you are using: if so, just disable the > User-Agent mangling completely. > > The are two main reasons you might want to use junkbuster: > 1) reduce ads > 2) privacy > > If the reason you are running junkbuster is just "1", then you will probably > get annoyed by junkbuster killing cookies and telling the whole world you are > a Macintosh user. I know a lot of people use junkbuster for privacy though, > and I believe "@" as the User-Agent is still a good default. Mind you, this also tells (clueful) webmasters something. Logs from one quasi-technical site show recent versions of IE well in the lead (35%), with the next most-commonly used single browser configuration being, you guessed it, Mozilla/3.01Gold (Macintosh; I; 68K) -- currently hovering around 2-3%. More than twice the registered Netscape usage. It's a small statement, but monitoring this configuration is going to give some indication of trends in privacy-fortifying software. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://www.netcom.com/~kmself Evangelist, Opensales, Inc. http://www.opensales.org What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Debian GNU/Linux rocks! http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ K5: http://www.kuro5hin.org GPG fingerprint: F932 8B25 5FDD 2528 D595 DC61 3847 889F 55F2 B9B0
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