From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Brendan Tildesley Subject: Re: [PATCH] gnu: icecat: correct useragent to GNU GuixSD. Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2016 22:39:13 +1000 Message-ID: <993e9fdb-97b1-9238-8079-1f78bd553b0f@openmailbox.org> References: <878tv0un7w.fsf@gnu.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:41843) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bihZA-0000Dc-IH for guix-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 10 Sep 2016 08:39:29 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bihZ6-0007BG-EG for guix-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 10 Sep 2016 08:39:27 -0400 Received: from smtp7.openmailbox.org ([62.4.1.41]:46303) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bihZ6-0007Ax-4h for guix-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 10 Sep 2016 08:39:24 -0400 In-Reply-To: <878tv0un7w.fsf@gnu.org> List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: guix-devel@gnu.org On 2016-09-10 19:18, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote: > Hi! > > Attached simple patch fixes spreading of theh terribly ignoring lie that > I would be running Windows NT. > > I'm probably displayng unimaginable ignorance here but it's beyond me > why a project like Firefox would hardcode such a default. > The user agent is a string that is freely provided to websites when you connect. Changing the default user agent in Guix's Icecat to Guix means that all Guix Icecat users will suddenly be identifiable by this datum, and automated surveillance networks will pick this up, bulking our browsing behaviour with other instances of the same user id, using that to serve up advertising to us on sites or whatever, I haven't really read much on this. This is the current Icecat user string followed by the user string of my version of Tor browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0 If we had Icecat 45 already, we would be helping Tor users be less trackable, but as you can see, just 4 characters are different, which is all that is needed to break anonymity. Perhaps there are still some people using Tor Browser 38 that we are assisting, but I suspect not many. I can't see how the version number would affect website behaviour realistically, so perhaps we could maintain our instance of Icecat patched with the latest Tor user agent instead, in order to assist Tor users? On the other hand it is kinda *bleh* to be advertising myself as a Windows user, skewing statistics, so It'd be nice to have a Linux, GNU/Linux, or Guix user agent, so that published OS usage statistics will display our mighty existence! User agents being changeable is meaningless unless there is at least one large cluster of users with some arbitrary string that can be chosen to hide with, so there may be greater value in keeping "Windows NT". I'm not sure, what do others think?