On Monday, December 20, 2010, Yo-Yo Ma <[email protected]> wrote:
> UPDATE:
>
> The BuiltWith team has removed Django because there aren't enough
> clues to accurately detect Django in some circumstances, and they
> didn't want to give bad data. Instead, they've added
> http://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Django-CSRF (which basically is
> telling you a site uses Django). They're also adding detection for
> detecting mod-wsgi.
>
> From the core team, are there any reliable clues to detect Django that
> are more consistent than <input> naming conventions? CSRF doesn't
> always apply. This tool can also be helpful for those contributors who
> run Django showcase sites, etc.

No, there aren't any completely reliable clues -- and in my opinion,
that's a good thing.

Providing an easy way to identify a Django site serves no purpose
other than inflating project ego. On the other hand, if I am a black
hat hacker, and i want to take down your site, being able to easily
identify the software running your site dramatically narrows the
search for possible attack vectors.

As much as I enjoy the trainspotting aspect of knowing where Django is
being used, it is information that doesn't need to be shared by
default. If I want to share the technology that I have used in
building my site, I can put up a colophon page, or write a case study
on a blog, or any number of other options. I see no reason that this
information needs to be machine readable at all, let alone machine
readable by default.

As Jeremy has noted, the closest you will get to easily identifying a
Django site is to look for the telltale signs of the admin site, but
admin is not universally deployed, nor is it universally deployed at
/admin (in fact, I routinely use a different URL for admin
deployment). You might also get some hints out of session cookie
naming - but again, not every site uses Django's session framework,
and if they do, the session cookie name is configurable.

Yours,
Russ Magee %-)

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