[CentOS] Centos in the Browser string ?

Sat Mar 26 14:50:45 UTC 2016
Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu>

On Fri, March 25, 2016 7:10 pm, James B. Byrne wrote:
>
> On Thu, March 24, 2016 11:56, g wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 03/24/16 09:29, Richard wrote:
>>>> Date: Thursday, March 24, 2016 14:10:41 +0000
>>>> From: Always Learning <centos at u64.u22.net>
>>>> On Wed, 2016-03-23 at 22:29 -0700, Alice Wonder wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> What purpose does it serve? I don't object to it being there
>>>>>  but I also don't see a benefit to it being there.
>>>>>
>>>>> Ubuntu btw is not exactly a distribution I want RHEL/EPEL/CentOS
>>>>> developers to emulate...
>>>>
>>>> Spread the successful Centos 'brand name' :-)
>>>
>>> The user-agent string is one of the items used in uniquely
>>> identifying/fingerprinting a user/machine, so the more generic it is
>>> the better. Including the details of the OS add to the "bits of
>>> identifying information" available to trackers.
>>>
>>> See the EFF testing site for more details:
>>>
>>>    <https://panopticlick.eff.org/>
>>>
>> --
>>
>> aware of panopticlick.
>>
>> if you have a file in profile directory, add this to it. if not,
>> create file and paste this in it.
>>
>>   //set user agent to blank
>>   user_pref("general.useragent.override", " ");
>>
>> what makes you get a unique rating is that you report no agent. only
>> info any site will know about you is your ip address.
>>
>> if you want to hide that, use a proxy server. ((GBWG))
>>
>>
>
> On the other hand, setting it to 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1;
> rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0' would make one look like the
> latest TOR browser.  Which, if CentOS set Firefox to that by default,
> would make identifying TOR users a great deal harder.

Which tor users prefer not to anyway ;-)

>
> Just a thought.
>
> --
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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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