Comment on Trend of websites blocking old versions of Chrome -- is this sensible?

• daveyOsborn@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Unless you wanna make life hard on yourself for no good reason, use your real UA where possible

  I’m not sure you understand the transparency problem. Codeberg is the /only/ service that I have ever encountered that honestly, transparently states that they blocked me on the basis of old chrome. All other blocks on the order of 10s or 100s per day give no reason. As a Tor user, I assume Tor is the problem. But now there are increasingly non-Tor criteria emerging. I cannot investigate every blockade. Hence why establishing a UA string db would be useful, which could then be incorporated into browsers.

  Cloudflare will flag you if you’re spoofing browser identity in any obvious way.

  I boycott Cloudflare. CF already blocks most of my access attempts and I am grateful for it. What disturbs me is when I discover that I am on a CF website that whitelisted Tor because such cases could lead to me accidentally patronising a Cloudflare supporter. I know there are plugins that would help me avoid those instances but if CF has another trigger to block me from their side, then it is mutually appreciated.

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  • frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    If your point is transparency, and the given justification is to block scrapers, then it makes sense they wouldn’t be transparent about it. You don’t want to give your adversary instructions about how to bypass your security.

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    • daveyOsborn@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      That could be a plausible reason for opacity if it were true, but I don’t think it’s true because blocking Tor (for example) is trivially discovered and the non-transparency only frustrates legit users. The opacity of an anti-tor policy has no effect on adversaries. Yet a vast majority of tor-hostile sites are sloppy about informing legit users.

      Infosec that relies on secrecy is already out on a limb in despiration. And in this situation, the collateral damage to friendlies based on arbitrary factors creates a heightened need to inform the legit users. An AI scraper bot is not going to be coded to know where to look for such announcements because that’s actually more effort for the attacker than manual trial and error. Note as well we are talking about relatively unsophisticated adversaries considering they were too lazy to code the user-agent header to dynamically blend better in the first place. (They will fix that in the future).

      Nonetheless, your point cannot be disregarded because those who take the crude approach of blocking on the basis of UA string are likely not thinking all this through.

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  • dgdft@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    [deleted]

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    • daveyOsborn@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      What that database would tell you is that you should use the latest closest-to-accurate UA for your browser and OS.

      If you actually mean the tool that uses the database, sure, but whatever the “closest” is requires a db as input to derive what that would be.

      But you seem to want to soapbox and relish in your self-inflicted struggles here, so I’ll leave you to play with your tin foil in peace.

      Although consumers should often be blamed for enshitification, this is not one of those cases. If an anti-enshitification tool would state: “this service judges you by your UA”, then I would protest accordingly so as to not be part of the problem of rewarding enshitification.

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