User Agent Stuff
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Once or twice when I've had problems getting one of my webapps to stream video from the target website it's been suggested that I should change the user agent string (@advocatux). In my efforts to learn more about user agents, I stumbled across www.whatismybrowser.com which parses your user agent string and hosts several interesting guides. Most of it is above my head but as I hadn't come across this site before, I decided to post the post the information in case it may be of interest to fellow ubuntu touchers.
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@dtarrant on a related note, Morph's user agent has been changed from Chromium to Chrome (https://github.com/ubports/morph-browser/pull/40)
On a less related note [*], https://panopticlick.eff.org/ is a good place to learn about browser fingerprints.
[*] I just want to plug that EFF site so people can learn more about what kind of info any browser is exposing
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@advocatux Interesting. Whatismybrowser reports my Nexus 4 OTA 5 browser as Chromium 65. Panopticlick doesn't report my browser identity.
Whatismybrowser also reports my user agent string.
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@dtarrant when using a mobile device in that page, to see the complete results, you need to tap on that orange sentence that says "show full results for fingerprinting"
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@advocatux Got it. Panopticlick also says Chromium 65. Surprisingly, it also says the browser fingerprint is unique amongst the 2.3 million tested in the last 45 days!
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@dtarrant do you have uAdBlock installed too?
The user agent has been changed to Chrome in devel, I imagine rc will get it in the next update.
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@advocatux No, I've never tried uAdBlock. Although adverts can be tiresome, I do understand that many internet resources would not be sustainable without advertising revenue. It's just another business model.
Regarding the switch to the Chrome user agent, what benefits are likely to arise?
I notice that vivid on my tablet uses Chromium 55 and that works pretty well.
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Although adverts can be tiresome, I do understand that many internet resources would not be sustainable without advertising revenue
I don't mind ads but I don't like direct marketing, tracking, and malvertising [*]
Regarding the switch to the Chrome user agent, what benefits are likely to arise?
It's to solve a problem with ReCaptcha, mainly.
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@advocatux That's a real eye-opener isn't it? How vulnerable to this class of attack is UT?
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@dtarrant I don't know but the confined nature of UT is good to mitigate it in the worse scenario
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@dtarrant another good thing about using uAdBlock is that you save a lot of data and that's a must for people using limited data plans in their devices.
See for example this study Troy Hunt did the last month (using pi-hole) https://www.troyhunt.com/mmm-pi-hole/
Whoa! That's an 80% reduction in network requests and an 82% reduction in the number of bytes transferred.
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@advocatux Cool!
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@advocatux
enjoyed reading that; very educational
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Might be a silly question but is there away to autostart uAdblock on start similar to Ufw.
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@lakotaubp you can set 'on' or 'off' uAdBlock using its GUI. When it's 'on' it's always "running" system-wide because what uAdBlock does is customize the hosts file.
If you have set it 'on' it survives system reboots. Maybe that's the autostart you are asking for?
Taking a look to any of these files https://github.com/mariogrip/uAdBlock/tree/master/host-files helps to get the full picture about what this app does.
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@advocatux Ok its only when I remember to re check its Gui is marked as off. So I put that down to restarting after daily dev updates. With my ageing brain I keep forgetting about it. : )
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@lakotaubp some time ago I needed to re-enable uAdBlock after every reboot but now it's already enabled after every daily update (YMMV).
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@advocatux Yes as usual you are correct : ) it seems
