191–200 of 329 posts
Google is a serial abuser of user-agent already so this is somewhat ironic.
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This is off topic but do you know why Edge is the only browser to support DRM for streaming? Or is that incorrect? I see lots of people who have to use edge on order to get 4k content from Netflix; presumably because of the DRM issues.
Other browsers support DRM too, but with different tradeoffs. Chrome uses Widevine, but one of Chrome's philosophies is that you should be able to wipe a Chrome install, reinstall Chrome, and have no trace that before/after are the same person. That means no leveraging machine-specific hardware details that would persist across installs. "Software-only DRM", essentially. Edge on Windows (and Safari on OSX) are able t…
The weird thing about this is that the only company I've seen doing problematic user-agent handling in recent years is Google themselves. They have released several products as Chrome-only, which then turned out to work fine in every other browser if they just pretended to be Chrome through the user agent. Same with their search pages, which on mobile were very bad in every non-Chrome browser purely based on user age…
Or we could build for Firefox. There's always that.
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I had been having an issue with Google Sheets and Firefox that the app decides to change row height randomly. On Firefox only. Obvious solution to which being...
> Obvious solution to which being... Installing an extension to spoof your user agent? Since we wouldn't want to reward Google being anti-competitive.
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> I don't really understand how this will result in any real difference in privacy or homogeneity of the web. It does a little: sites don't passively receive this information all the time, instead they have to actively ask for it. And browsers can say no, much like they can with blocking third party cookies. In any case I'm not sure privacy is the ultimate goal here: it's intended to replace the awful user agent snif…
Switching it from passive to active means you can count it towards https://github.com/bslassey/privacy-budget . Yes, sites can ask for all sorts of things, but if they ask for enough that they could plausibly be fingerprinting you then they start seeing their requests denied. (Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)
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Other browsers support DRM too, but with different tradeoffs. Chrome uses Widevine, but one of Chrome's philosophies is that you should be able to wipe a Chrome install, reinstall Chrome, and have no trace that before/after are the same person. That means no leveraging machine-specific hardware details that would persist across installs. "Software-only DRM", essentially. Edge on Windows (and Safari on OSX) are able t…
Its absurd that paying customers get a worse experience than just using the piratebay.
When I use netflix, I have a much better experience.
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Its absurd that paying customers get a worse experience than just using the piratebay.
Last time I used piratebay, I saw a lot of porn and malware/scam ads. I had to find and install a torrent client. Then I had to make sure I was downloading a movie that had enough seeders. And then I couldn't watch the movie until (and if) the download finished. When I use netflix, I have a much better experience.
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> I'm pretty sure that the webmasters responsible for this are using user agent string blocking as a naive attempt to block bots from scraping their site, but that assumes that the bots that they want to block actually send an accurate user agent string the first place. That is exactly what they are doing, and it works really well. We blocked user agents with lib in them at reddit for a long time. Any legit person bu…
> Any legit person building a legit bot would know to fake the agent string. What, that's totally backwards. Anyone using a bot to do things that might get blocked by publishers fakes the string, legit purposes should really show who / what they are.