Meh. IIRC, basic functionality is still there and maybe even a bit more, there’s just some features you cannot use.
Why not to whitelist operating system user agents
61–70 of 122 posts
Re: Why not to whitelist operating system user agents
#62Banks do stuff like this all the time - they are always the long tail of security - could be a topic in itself. I contemplated this for a very long time and decided that JP Morgan would rather take the hit for bad security then pay wages and benefits to support people to deal with password resets, lost yubikeys, etc. No other answer makes sense.
My advise to OP is to dump Chase, Citibank, Bank Of America, ASAP. Move your money to one of the millennial focused banks, or an ETrade checking account.
The big banks hate you, they think your stupid, offering you retail banking services is the bane of their existence. They are going to knock you over with $40 fees because you SHOULD pay them to put up with you — at least that is how they see it.
There are much better options these days, just search for zero fee checking.
Re: Why not to whitelist operating system user agents
#63For anyone who works at the company who does that: why you do it? Is it to reduce amount of testing, and only have a few "blessed" browsers with guaranteed happy experience? Any other reasons?
They may have spotted a bot using this UA and deduces it's a pattern
Re: Why not to whitelist operating system user agents
#64I ran into a similar problem with the website of my general practitioner. It worked fine in all cases, except when using Firefox on Linux, which I use. After lots of testing and trying to contact whoever built the website I found that it blocked only user-agents which contained this literal string: X11; Ubuntu; Linux Only when that string was in there verbatim would it fail all requests with a 403 Forbidden. After I…
Yeah, it's amazing how short sighted some developers and sysadmins can be when tasked with solving a problem.
Oh, we have a WordPress exploit? Let's blacklist User Agent strings!
Re: Why not to whitelist operating system user agents
#65Huh? I am able to log in to Chase just fine in my banking virtual machine (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS; Firefox 94.0 64-bit). I’m not using User Agent Switcher, and the User agent string shows that I’m using X11/Ubuntu.
As an aside, one issue Chase did have, 10 years ago, was that their DNS servers would return “query refused” if you sent them an AAAA (i.e. IPv6 IP) query. This actually caused issues with my recursive DNS server; I had to make AAAA (IPv6) queries handle errors differently than A (IPv4) queries. I just checked, and Chase finally fixed their DNS and IPv6 issues.
Re: Why not to whitelist operating system user agents
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things fail in the weirdest ways in unsupported environments though, it’s not like the “make transfer” button doesn’t work, it’s more like it might not even show up in the first place. Having 99% of your website work and the last 1% not work is a dealbreaker in many cases, and these “the site may not work for you based on your OS” banners lead the user into thinking it does work 100% if it works in 99% of the cases.…
Unlikely. This is a browser. If it's going to fail, it won't be some js somewhere. It's going to be the whole thing.
That's not true. All it takes is using an unsupported CSS rule for something to simply disappear from the page under certain circumstances. As a recent example, I found out some of our users couldn't find a specific button in an application. It still existed, but we used the zoom property to make it stand out more, which for some reason is only supported in Chrome.
Re: Why not to whitelist operating system user agents
#67> Worse, Chase even openly admits to being hostile to Linux and BSD to someone on Reddit. It’s something even Microsoft, Windows PC/hardware OEMs, or Apple won’t do.
If you click through to the link, you will see that this claim is totally made up.
Re: Why not to whitelist operating system user agents
#68Huh? I am able to log in to Chase just fine in my banking virtual machine (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS; Firefox 94.0 64-bit). I’m not using User Agent Switcher, and the User agent string shows that I’m using X11/Ubuntu. As an aside, one issue Chase did have, 10 years ago, was that their DNS servers would return “query refused” if you sent them an AAAA (i.e. IPv6 IP) query. This actually caused issues with my recursive DNS serve…
Congratulations, you're part of the "Some Linux user agents get through" segment noted in the second paragraph.
Re: Why not to whitelist operating system user agents
#69Try Japanese business banking - where you have to pick an OS and stick with it when registering (with a paper form), and must use either the ESR release of Firefox or Internet Explorer. If you don't have a user agent of either of those it won't even let you sign in.
Try Spanish online digital administration. The digital certificates only worked in IE. And mid-process they require installing a Java-based program that required a different type of digital certificate. That of course make you restart the browser and lose all the data entered.
Just wow. I couldn't even come up with such a bad process if I wanted.
Re: Why not to whitelist operating system user agents
#70My employer for currently blacklists Firefox from being used to launch a session in their 3rd-party remote desktop portal. I use a UA switcher. It works fine. This behavior, while brain-dead, is at least trivial to circumvent. I'm happy to let them continue to check a box on their audit preparation form saying they have control over this, and to continue to have a URL rule to change my UA for the portal, rather than…
had the same with a very broken citrix setup. Inalways hated citrix itself because how srupidly it was set up, but the more quirks I was working around, I realized that in the windows world it's actually a pretty sophisticated product with a lot of tunables for even Linux guests.
Nevertheless, I left banking for good and chose a company where I have real IT engineers as colleagues.