Started to get this message when accessing Reddit. I use LibreWolf as a browser, which does indeed provide a more generic user agent to combat fingerprinting, but nothing out of the ordinary either (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0). Anyone else experiencing this?
Edit: seems to have resolved itself. Thanks for confirming I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Let’s hope this isn’t some new algorithm to test if for insufficient fingerprinting so Reddit can kick ad-resistant users.
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Reddit is corrupt. It probably has something to do with them wanting to track you, and they can’t track you if you have a blank user agent.
Stay here at Lemmy where humans are respected as humans instead of data mines. Life is more dignified here at Lemmy.
Stay here at Lemmy where humans are respected as humans
I saw a post a few days ago where one Lemmy user threatened to triangulate another user via IP, and then hurt them, because they said Linux doesn’t work out of the box as well as windows in their experience.
This was on a main instance. The person didn’t get in any trouble.
Did you report the comment?
Yikes. That’s concerning.
Was it a shit post? Don’t mistake me as being dismissive of threats, it’s just that “triangulate based on IP” sounds like a joke.
No, unfortunately. The guy seemed really mad. Calling the other guy a moron, idiot, and telling him to apologise. From what I could see from the comments, it seems like the one guy visited the angry guys website, and the guy threatened to use his IP to find out where he lived. Then used threats about how it’s nice to sleep at night without fear, and that if you piss the wrong people off you’ll know.
All because the guy was having Linux issues and said windows worked better for them. I only found the thread because I’m also having the same issues lol.
That’s a massive yikes. Be sure to report shit like that.
The mad guy sounds tech illiterate anyway. Nowadays you can’t track people by IP anymore. Sure you get a city, maybe a city district and then what?
To prove my point, here’s where my IP (Without VPN) will tell you where I live: Berlin. I live on the other side of the country compared to Berlin.
These scriptkiddies are so pathetic .
Yo Pop OS is working ony Surface pro 3 perfectly basically, definitely better than Windows 10 was.
But Linux DOES require more effort to set up than Windows. Who in the hell would deny that?
Yeah, Lemmy is full of shit heads and mods/admins rarely care. You can also see plenty of misogyny, non stop verbal abuse, etc. Lemmy is basically a playground for 13 year olds with development difficulties.
You can also see plenty of misogyny, non stop verbal abuse, etc.
Lemmy is basically a playground for 13 year olds with development difficulties.
I’m just going to highlight these two sentences, and ask you think really really hard about why this comment has more downvotes than upvotes.
Maybe they think that saying “development difficulties” means it isn’t verbally abusive? lol
Truth hurts 13yo kids and they do what they can do best - hit dat downside button hard!
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Damn. Lemmy is hella doomed when a response to an insane thing someone else did on Lemmy is “who the fuck cares?”.
Didn’t realize you support people threatening others based on a comment about an operating system.
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Until its your problem, lol.
Never has to be if they are an alt of someone in control of the instance.
Eh, I kind of see where he’s coming from. My response to threats like that is “have fun storming the castle, fuckface.”
Downvoters must not be Princess Bride fans.
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For someone who doesn’t care, you sure can’t shut up about it.
Look how little I care guys. Hey you. Yeah, you. Did you know I don’t care? Totally don’t, 110%. Make sure to tell your friends how few fucks I give about all of this.
Why am I still talking about it? Clearly because I care so little. I learned early on that the more you talk about something, the less you care. My utter inability to stop talking about it is the supreme sign of my achieving the pinnacle of carelessness.
That’s all well and good but now that the smoke cleared it’s a Twitter/Mastodon situation
Yeah. You’re not wrong.
Ever since I discovered I can have infinite conversations with infinite people about infinite topics, I am addicted to this format.
Now see how they exploit us 😡
I’m my golden socialist utopia online platforms would flourish freely with each new conversation.
I don’t quite understand what you mean. I know Twitter has kind of gone to hell, but beyond that I’m not sure.
I think his point was that most conversations happen where people are, and people are still more on Twitter than Mastodon by multiple orders of magnitude even after the “exodus”.
Stay here at Lemmy where humans are respected as humans instead of data mines. Life is more dignified here at Lemmy.
I like the sentiment, but it is so incredibly naive to think that there aren’t crawlers scraping every ounce of data from Lemmy as possible. While Lemmy itself may not be collecting user data (depending on who is hosting your home instances of choice), other data that is valuable can still be collected, particularly for LLM AI.
If you can access it, the data scrapers have already crawled it.
Especially considering the post from a little while ago showing that admins of Lemmy instances can see what individual users are upvoting and downvoting. There’s nothing to stop a bad actor from setting up an instance and just harvesting data.
admins of Lemmy instances can see what individual users are upvoting and downvoting
Everyone can see that via kbin. for example, here’s your comment.
(not sure about downvotes… you might have to work a bit more to see those.)
What else can admin see?
T H E F U T U R E
Why use scraper on Lemmy when bots can federate and have the data directly sent to them?
Everything they can get from Lemmy is public and not necessarily tied to any specific person. Like I’m not actually Helen’s lunch.
That’s exactly what Helen’s lunch would say.
That’s why I just say dumb shit on here.
Just look at how Reddit uses fingerprinting, absolutely part of their tracking
and they can’t track you if you have a blank user agent.
They absolutely can. A blank user agent is a fingerprint like any other.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/17vbyr8/whoa_there_pardner_error_message/
Text:
Hey all!
It looks like most of you had difficulty reaching the site for about 5 minutes, but those issues should have subsided.
During that time, you may have been shown an incorrect error message that read:
Whoa there, pardner! reddit's awesome and all, but you may have a bit of a problem. Make sure your User-Agent is not empty, is something unique and descriptive and try again. if you're supplying an alternate User-Agent string, try changing back to default as that can sometimes result in a block.To share some additional context on what happened - we pushed a bad code change in our tooling that resulted in a significant amount of users getting blocked without doing anything wrong. So if you happened to see that error message within the last hour, don’t fret! We’ve reverted the code change that caused this error and things should be back to normal very soon if they aren’t already.
“bad code change” describes pretty much every vide change they’ve done over the past 7ish years lol
I also don’t believe them. This was a test.
Or it was just a bug. You know, the thing that happens literally all the time in every codebase in the world
Maybe, but this is exactly the sort of thing I would expect them to do a test run for. They are desperate to stop ad-blocking.
Tests and QA don’t catch everything. From what I can tell this affects a small percent of users, so it’s very likely that it slipped through any testing that was done if that’s the case
Why are you still using that shitty site?
I say this as someone that was there since before the digg migration.
I hate using it, but there are some things I just can’t find info on anywhere else. Reddit is always a last resort, but it frequently turns out to be the only resource.
Yup, sadly I need to use it for certain things. I have asked for my ban to be reversed from some salty mod, but they will not reply. Hello Opera and VPN and I can go comment and not care.
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What certain things could you really need it for that can’t be fulfilled by other internet means? Stop using that sorry ass site.
Actual insightful conversation on a variety of subjects. Especially current events, I notice this the most when discussing content updates in video games. While official forums exist a lot of the games I play essentially use their subreddit as a semi-official community with devs being active participants.
/r/eve and /r/pathofexile are great examples of this.
It’s hard to discount the success Reddit has had over the last decade or so positioning themselves as the “front page of the internet” giving people a forum to discuss all manner of subjects.
As I understand a lot of the hatred against Reddit and spez specifically comes from his attempts to monetize this phenomenon, not how effective/popular the site was.
This.
Ah, gaming. Got it. To me, it’s the opposite. I get insightful conversation in a variety of subjects here on Lemmy. I do check Reddit once in a while, though.
Edit: Downvoted by redditors? What are you doing on Lemmy, then? You’re not even OP!
For one I was playing MW3 the other day and the FOV glitch kept coming up. I was super annoyed by it did a search and bingo a person put the solution of the sub. Shit like that.
Wish they would at least be honest in their messaging, the whole “quirky” official reddit branding doesn’t really work anymore now that they’ve gone full corporate mode
Au contraire, it’s totally kawaii-dystopia-punk! :P
Now that Web Environment Integrity is shut down, Reddit decides to take matters into their own hands…
- please use something unique and descriptive
Best I can do is “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)”
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/118.0 master race checking in
Happened to me as well. Holy shit. Are they trying to nuke web scrappers/robots now? Whatever that is, it’s no good.
I honestly don’t think it has anything to do with that. Scrapers going to scrape. They just want more metadata to identify you and know what propaganda to feed to you based on our online habits. The amount of techniques to identify someone based on JS alone should stir a rebellion, but we just accept it. If you have JS enabled, I can tell you what OS you use, what kind of processor you have, info about your graphics card, monitor resolution, etc. I can even identify you based on how your computer renders graphics. Oh, you’ve disabled JS and opted out of us tracking you based on X, Y, Z… great, now we can identify you based on your privacy settings.
What is JS?
Javascript
If you’re on a website and you click a button and something happens other than going to a different page or downloading a file, it’s almost always because of JavaScript (JS)
It’s a programming language that’s built into most browsers that allows for interactive functionality. It’s implemented in a way that typically protects the security of the computer, because it doesn’t have access to the files on the computer or other sensitive things.
Because it can’t directly check a lot of things, browsers often provide a way for people writing websites to check what capabilities they can use.
This means there’s a way to ask "can I do 3d graphics using this particular feature?”.
The intent is so you can let your website handle computers that can’t do what you need, rather than just trying and crashing.Sufficiently determined people can ask for all of the various clues that are provided, and use that to make a pretty unique identifier for the computer, which they can then use to track you around the Internet.
Various ways of fixing this have been proposed, but they all fall short one way or another.
Either by making the web far less interactive than people have come to expect, making tracking easier but at least they’re not misusing the data, or requiring an unrealistic amount of reworking how the entire web works.JavaScript, code that websites can run in your browser when you open them
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Same here on firefox mobile just started 10 minutes ago
Im not tech certified so i just figured out its my privacy possum doing this user agent thing which i like
What’s a user agent?
Little descriptor your browser has to tell websites what it is and where it comes from
It also tells the website the OS you’re running, as well as the browser, and various version numbers of stuff.
One interesting experiment is to use a user agent changer to view a website, and watch how the website changes every time you load a new user agent.
Google will remove search options if you’re using Firefox (mobile?), for example. But if you change your user agent to say you have Chrome, even if you are actually using Firefox, those options magically come back and work. It’s almost as if that’s anti-competitive behavior or something…
It’s also how a lot of websites know whether or not to give you Windows executables or Mac executables, or Linux executables, etc.
Firefox with user agent as chrome
Firefox with user agent as firefox
Holy smokes, the whole graph is removed… and they moved up “Shopping”
Brilliant example. I think some of the search tools like date range or image color also get removed with the Firefox user agent, but I don’t quite remember.
It also tells the website the OS you’re running, as well as the browser, and various version numbers of stuff
While it’s true that many browsers choose to follow a convention that includes that info,
User-Agentis just a string, so something likefukuis a legitimate UAhttps://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1945#section-10.15
curl -vA fuku example.com 2>&1 | grep -E '^[<>] (User|HTTP)'Really? Huh, TIL. Thanks.
Before the paranoid think it’s invasive, it’s used mainly to tell the website what your browsers capabilities are, so that features work and render properly. And by “tell the website”, I mean they generally serve the same “code” to everyone, and your browser just uses different parts of it.
It’s not as big of a deal now, but browsers used to render things very differently and had unique style features. Safari is still a big offender of this.
The above Google search features probably means the developers being Google, probably just thoroughly tested the more niche features on Chrome. And probably at some point, other browsers like Safari shit the bed (common) because they used features that Safari didn’t support at the time, and decided to just disable them for Safari.
It’s also used to create a digital fingerprint so you can be tracked without downloading a cookie.
Uhh, I’m unaware of how that’s even possible. There is no uniquely identifiable information in the UA. Everyone keeping their browser and os up to date are going to fall into the same few buckets. Are you pulling that out of your ass, or do you actually know of a technique that abuses it?
It is one of dozens of things used to establish a unique fingerprint. Check this out, I bet you can be individually identified and tracked with nothing more than what your browser reveals, including the UA.
Reddit uses exactly this to enforce site bans so they can identify people that just change emails or even public ip addresses. It’s almost certainly used to create phantom profiles at hundreds of sites whether you make an account or not.
https://smartframe.io/blog/browser-fingerprinting-everything-you-need-to-know/
Not the person you’re replying to, but I would second what they’re saying. I recall many years ago reading a post from the Tor browser team explaining that they customise the UA and even browser window size to avoid fingerprinting. It’s not the UA alone, but that in combination with other values the site you’re visiting can detect.
User agent is also the very first thing checked on the below fingerprinting site. I was surprised to see that 0.00% of me have the same user agent as me!
I guess you’ve never heard of JA3 fingerprints?
Yeah I didn’t think disabling features for Firefox users would make sense. The user would have to know you’re punishing them for it to be effective at incentivising them to switch to chrome.
I personally don’t trust Google anyway and mainly just use duckduckgo.
I think that they probably made it so their app looks nicer and want chrome to match, anyway then there’s apps that just block you if you’re not using chromium or derivatives, despite working on the browser you’re using. Ahem Ms-teams and another video conferencing software that I had to use.
Google also changes a bunch of features if you change the user agent to some really old or non existent browser versions.
I don’t think they are making Firefox worse on purpose. I think it’s just something they don’t bother to fix.
Hello
Can confirm I have a problem with Reddit and I am empty inside.
Rel
Is this a typo or the latest expression I have to remember now?
It’s not a typo. Rel - relatable. I’m just using it cuz I don’t want to be outdated
Thank you!
No problem :)
DNF
tells a website what browser or app you’re using
Couldn’t find any explanation on Google so I tried emailing them about this. I got back this lovely gem:
Reddit Support (Reddit Support) Nov 14, 2023, 15:29 PST
Hi there!
Thanks for contacting us! At this time, we are not currently accepting inquiries via email. If you need support with our API or have questions, please submit your request here.
Cheers, Your friends at Reddit
But VPN worked.
RiF just kicked me out. I think reddit is trying to do another sweep to break unofficial apps/plug-ins/etc.
Patched boost still working can’t post as I’m temp banned for reporting spam
I’m temp banned for reporting spam
Funny how that works, isn’t it?
I got perma-banned for “mod abuse” for reporting too much misinformation.
The fuck are they doing over there
they do realise bullshit kills a platform
They realized they got more money for ads if they have gullable users
this shit happens here, too. capricious bans not for breaking the rules but for hurting mod feelings, OR, literally just reporting each spam comment. swear to god, i got banned for reporting all the copy-pasted comments left by a user and the reason was abusing the report button.
peggy lou baldwin wasn’t happy.
Probably best for people like that to never be in charge of anything
They do?
Well from an advertising point of view just look at Twitter loads of big advertisers pulling out due to the anout of shite on there now
It was still working for you until now? I uninstalled it several weeks ago because I couldn’t get anything. Kinda makes me want to reinstall it and try again.
My RIF hasn’t worked for months, but I think there is a way to patch it with Revanced? IDK, I haven’t tried it. I do miss the porn though.
There’s one called Stealth I got on recommendation from here. Can’t log in but NSFW subs are available and you can still build your own feed.
Sorry I guess it’s android only https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.cosmos.unreddit/
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Patched Sync still working for me.
Glitch or not, fuck reddit
Happened to me yesterday (Windows 11, Chrome latest version.) A simple wipe of my browser files fixed it.
I don’t even know how to use an API, let alone write code more complex than a For or Do Until loop in VBA, which I literally learned on the job to automate a finance task I was picking up.
Either Spez is turning paranoid that everyone and their mother is leeching off his data, or this was a critical bug.
Spez is a morally bankrupt cuck anyway.
User agent blocking is typically done when they are trying to block bots or crawlers.
they’re trying to limit automated scrap or the like. avoid that domain as much as you can
I’m sure this is exactly it, they want to stop any / all non official API access to prevent bots and scraping, I’m certain, it matches with their recent behaviors.
