Re: [PATCH] gnu: icecat: correct useragent to GNU GuixSD.

[Brendan Tildesley]

On 2016-09-10 19:18, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Attached simple patch fixes spreading of theh terribly ignoring lie that
> I would be running Windows NT.
>
> I'm probably displayng unimaginable ignorance here but it's beyond me
> why a project like Firefox would hardcode such a default.
>
The user agent is a string that is freely provided to websites when you
connect. Changing the default user agent in Guix's Icecat to Guix means
that all Guix Icecat users will suddenly be identifiable by this datum,
and automated surveillance networks will pick this up, bulking our
browsing behaviour with other instances of the same  user id, using that
to serve up advertising to us on sites or whatever, I haven't really
read much on this.
This is the current Icecat user string followed by the user string of my
version of Tor browser:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0

If we had Icecat 45 already, we would be helping Tor users be less
trackable, but as you can see, just 4 characters are different, which is
all that is needed to break anonymity. Perhaps there are still some
people using Tor Browser 38 that we are assisting, but I suspect not
many. I can't see how the version number would affect website behaviour
realistically, so perhaps we could maintain our instance of Icecat
patched with the latest Tor user agent instead, in order to assist Tor
users? On the other hand it is kinda *bleh* to be advertising myself as
a Windows user, skewing statistics, so It'd be nice to have a Linux,
GNU/Linux, or Guix user agent, so that published OS usage statistics
will display our mighty existence! User agents being changeable is
meaningless unless there is at least one large cluster of users with
some arbitrary string that can be chosen to hide with, so there may be
greater value in keeping "Windows NT". I'm not sure, what do others think?