Hi, Brendan Tildesley <brendan.tildes...@openmailbox.org> writes:
> 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? > > I agree and I am against applying this patch. -- ng0 For non-prism friendly talk find me on http://www.psyced.org
