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556 points campuscodi | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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amatecha ◴[] No.41867018[source]
I get blocked from websites with some regularity, running Firefox with strict privacy settings, "resist fingerprinting" etc. on OpenBSD. They just give a 403 Forbidden with no explanation, but it's only ever on sites fronted by CloudFlare. Good times. Seems legit.
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mzajc ◴[] No.41868594[source]
I randomize my User-Agent header and many websites outright block me, most often with no captcha and no useless error message.

The most egregious is Microsoft (just about every Microsoft service/page, really), where all you get is a "The request is blocked." and a few pointless identifiers listed at the bottom, purely because it thinks your browser is too old.

CF's captcha page isn't any better either, usually putting me in an endless loop if it doesn't like my User-Agent.

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lovethevoid ◴[] No.41870975[source]
Not sure a random UA extension is giving you much privacy. Try your results on coveryourtracks eff, and see. A random UA would provide a lot of identifying information despite being randomized.

From experience, a lot of the things people do in hopes of protecting their privacy only makes them far easier to profile.

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mzajc ◴[] No.41871173[source]
coveryourtracks.eff.org is a great service, but it has a few limitations that apply here:

- The website judges your fingerprint based on how unique it is, but assumes that it's otherwise persistent. Randomizing my User-Agent serves the exact opposite - a given User-Agent might be more unique than using the default, but I randomize it to throw trackers off.

- To my knowledge, its "One in x browsers" metric (and by extension the "Bits of identifying information" and the final result) are based off of visitor statistics, which would likely be skewed as most of its visitors are privacy-conscious. They only say they have a "database of many other Internet users' configurations," so I can't verify this.

- Most of the measurements it makes rely on javascript support. For what it's worth, it claims my fingerprint is not unique when javascript is disabled, which is how I browse the web by default.

The other extreme would be fixing my User-Agent to the most common value, but I don't think that'd offer me much privacy unless I also used a proxy/NAT shared by many users.

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1. lovethevoid ◴[] No.41874723[source]
Randomizing to throw trackers off only works if you only ever visit sites once.

But yes, without javascript a lot of tracking functions fail to operate. That is good for privacy, and EFF notes that on the site.

You can fix your UA to a common value, it's about providing the least amount of identifying bits, and randomizing it just provides another bit to identify you by. Always remember: an absence of information is also valuable information!