The fun of a VPN + browser user agent stuffs spoofing!

Yes Autodesk, I am fully fucking aware of the fact that it is not made for Linux but for what reason do you feel the need to block me from downloading it?! You know, there is Wine and there are also VMs... fucking pricks

And then they even start mixing languages 👏

Disclaimer: I can't 'officially' verify this.

I've been using Firefox as main browser with about 5 addons for added privacy for ages now. When googles (fucking) reCaptcha takes more than a few minutes on Firefox (about 90 percent of the time, I'm estimating), I switch to Chromium (with the same amount of (similar) privacy addons) so I can go on with my stuff.

Now, I recently thought 'why not try to do user agent spoofing on Firefox to see if reCaptcha would start working 'normally'?

So, I installed a user agent spoofing addon on Firefox/Chromium, results:

Without spoofing:

Firefox reCaptcha success rate: 10 percent approx. (mostly 2+ minutes)
Chromium: 90 percent. (mostly instant)

With spoofing:
Firefox: 90 percent approx.
Chromium: 10-20 percent approx.

Again, I can't prove any of this yet but mother of fucking god, whenever using Chromium or spoofing Chromium on Firefox the succession rate skyrockets.

Google, what the fuck are you up to?

"Make the feature more useful."

Please write a user story. It's hard to determine what you want.

"As Sales Agent I would like the <feature> to be extended so it's more useful to me."

(ノಥ,_｣ಥ)ノ彡┻━┻

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

Today I found the reason for one of the stupidest bugs I had in like.. ever!

Me and a fellow student are currently porting the infoscreen of our university to HTML.
One of the functions of this screen is showing payed advertising and I was working on loading and displaying the images of our advertisment partners.

I had the whole system in place, and the images loaded.. but they wouldn't show. Upon inspection I saw they were displayed but with a size of 0x0 px.

I spend hours searching the web for javascript bugs, double checking my css file and everything you could imagine. I even asked my CS professor for help and he didn't find the cause for this strange issue I had.

..and then I saw it. A little note in Chromes inspector saying the image style would be set by my user-agent. Despite not trusting that information, I closely inspected my browser.

And then it dawned on me.. I would turn my adblocker off and lo and behold.. it worked!

I then, after celebrating my triumph, changed the tag of the img element from 'advert' to something else…

Weekend projects are fun! Although front end is still a challenge, it looks good enough.

Suddenly got the idea to do something with letsencrypt/nginx wildcard subdomains (*.example.com) so created a project around that now through which you can check what your ip address/user agent/operating system/ip version is (maybe more to come) but due to the wildcard part you can enter quite a number of subdomains which all show the related info.

I'd find it very useful myself, not sure if other people would but oh well!

Who dafuq thought it would be a good idea to have the user agent stylesheet say the <body> has a margin:8px

That's so annoying and stupid, fuu

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

Did i just get rick rolled through a user agent?

"[17/Nov/2020:10:20:42 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 1274 "-" "We are no strangers to love. You know the rules and so do I. A full commitment is what Im thinking of. You wouldnt get this from any other guy.." "-""

Great !! Why would a tech giant like amazon work against linux ?

Amazon Prime music doesnt work with Linux/Firefox , but suddenly works when i switch user agent to Windows/Firefox . They are somehow purposefully blocking out linux ! Why ?? Whyyy ??

What you see in that screenshot, that was earned.

I'm on the plane and I want an hour of free Gogo (read: crappy) WiFi on my laptop (so I can push the code I'm probably the most proud of, more on that another time). The problem is that the free T-Mobile WiFi is apparently only available on mobile.

So after trying to just use responsive mode, and that still (almost obviously) not working. I realize it's time to bring in the big guns: A User Agent switcher. Small catch: I don't have an add-on for FF that can do that.

So on my phone I find an add-on that can and download the file. To send it to my computer, I initially thought to go through KDEConnect, but Gogo's network also isolates each system, so that doesn't work. So I try to send it over Bluetooth, except I can't. Why? Because Android's Bluetooth share "doesn't support" the .xpi extension, so I dump it in a zip (in retrospect, I should have just renamed it), and now I can share.

After a few tries, I successfully get the file over, extract the zip, and install the extension. Whew! Now I open up Gogo's page and proceed to try again, but this time I change the user-agent. Doesn't work... Ah! Cookies! I delete the cookies for Gogo (I had a cookie editor add-on already), but I had to try a few times because Gogo's scripts keep trying to, but I got it in the end.

Finally that stupid error saying it's for phones only went away, and I could write this rant for you.

curl 127.0.0.1/robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: Injuring a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Disallow: Disobeying the orders given by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Disallow: Not protecting own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Add a random string (like "AnyBrowser/1.2.3") to your user agent string, and get warnings about unsupported browsers, reduced functionality, and Google drive completely refusing to start at all.

It's the very same browser, just another user agent string. Ever heard of feature detection? Ever heard of usability, accessibility, progressive enhancement? How can developers be so lost in 2022?

I just tried to reproduce the reason why Vivaldi stopped adding their brand to user agent strings but sails under false flag pretending to be Google chrome. So it doesn't show up in browser statistics either and Google people can keep thinking everyone is using their shitware.

The layout for my little side project was working fine in IE last week. Made some server side additions over the weekend and now the layout is broken... in IE only. Guess who's putting in a user-agent redirect to a "Works best in Chrome or Firefox" page? 😉

Doing browser detection the wrong way, probably dictated by Google marketing policy: any Chromium browser is supported by Google Docs - unless the user agent string contains the "Vivaldi" keyword.

"Issues" like this made the Vivaldi team remove their brand from their default user agent string long ago, effectively hiding the browser's market share in stats, as it will be counted as Google Chrome adding to Chrome's market share.

Fuck Homestead.

For the fortune of you not to know, Homestead is a sad attempt at a Wix-like build your own website platform.

However, Homestead is the most unusable piece of shit platform that humans have ever had the misery of interacting with

Lets start off with the login page. The login page is small, unresponsive and half the time just deletes your input whenever you press submit.

It's important to note that unless you're running MacOS or Windows, Homestead will send to an error page on which there's a link to contact support, but pressing that link requires MacOS or Windows.

Fine, I'll fiddle around with my user-agent, and we'll be in soon enough. But now we come to the joy that is the website editor itself.

The website editor is clunky, hard to use, and has enough menus and submenus and sidebars to make the Jira UI shake with fear. Each interface option label is either ridiculously ambiguous or just straight up wrong. The built-in HTML editor doesn't support HTML5, in the name of "browser compatibility".

CSS? Pah! Who needs it! Our psuedo-90s skeuomorphic ugly-as-shit prebuilt styles will work just fine. Responsive design? Bullshit! Nobody uses a smartphone to browse the web, so why do we need to handle it?

Uploading a file? Good fucking luck buddy. There's a complicated dance among the minefield of pop-ups that ask you to confirm some shit or modify some shit and you gotta click the right option each time or else the file won't upload.

Wanna use https like 86% of the entire web and all modern websites? That's a premium feature. Fork over an extra $10 a month

Ok ok, I made it through all that. Dig through the thousands of menus to find the 'publish changes' button, and sigh with relief.

Open up a private browser tab to check my work, and nope. The site looks like shit, even by Homestead's standards. That's because Homestead claims to be a WYSIWYG editor, but it's a damn lie. The site looks like shit, so it's time do dive back into the hellhole that is this damn site editor.

And rinse and repeat. Deal with the shitty editor, publish, and pray it doesn't look like garbage. Be too scared to test on other devices because this flaming pile of dog shit pretending to be a website is bad enough on my device.

Two more months, then I'm done with this client. Someone get me a drink

Lots of questions going on about devRant. Just want to make devRant better.

1. Please tell the update intervals of upvotes and downvotes. Is there a delay? Doesnt really matter but i see many times i got a upvote notif but my score didnt increased...

2. Duplicate image algo is so poor. I know it is only in beta, but i see so many reposts which has the same pic but only with the resolution different or the image with the devrant watermark.

3. Minor, tags should be also saved when exitting the post rant activity.

4. Feature request : go to top, bottom in rant

5. Please make web app accessible in mobile. I think you check the user agent for the web app, but can you make it available to mobile users who cant download the app?

6. When accessing the web app in mobile, i type devrant.io/feed
Then, by the wonderful intent you made, it opens the app automatically. I was writing a rant, but it was all deleted.

7. Any new podcasts and cartoons planned?

8. Still bug not fixed.
Write a comment in a long rant.
Delete the comment you just wrote.
You cant reply to the last person comment.

Thanks.

Wtf? What kind of user agent header is that? Why don't you go ahead and insert my fucking social security number in there, Android? According to amiunique, this is literally a unique header ON ITS OWN.

It does give you that cold rush feeling, when a low level support agent can just use some sort of "user impersonation" feature and literally send you screenshots of your conversations or other, what seems private information and should be only used for actual escalated staff, for when there's a need for an actual middleman (ie. client not paying - logs review) and for everything else there should be a test account they can do screenshots from, e.g. for general website use questions

Such beautiful. Much wow.
I am sick of this shit.
Yet another tour bus company fails to serve a website for tourists to reserve a seat ffs.
Tried the mobile version first. The UI looked awesome, but I could not reserve a seat. I could only see free and already reserved seats.
"Fuck you" I tought. Let us try it by changing user agent to desktop.
Now the UI sucks camel pussy, but the functionality works. Well... not so well. I want to sit at the most right corner to avoid people who keep going to WC or have other ADS syndroms thus interrupting my fucking sleep once every 30 minutes.

what if there was a psuedo-html/css markup language which could generate browser-specific pages?
eg. index.psuedohtml ->
index.ie8.html
index.firefox.html
index.chrome.html
then the page size would be reduced a lot. the server could use the user agent to see which to respond with. is this a good idea?

“Huddles don't work in safari 🤡,” Slack said.
Develop → User Agent → Google Chrome.
Boom, huddles suddenly work in Safari, and my today's huddle went absolutely fine.

Yep, I switched to Safari as my default browser. Previously, I didn't use it solely because YouTube's full-screen mode acted weird, but now I quit watching YouTube altogether.

Safari is a stellar browser. First, it wipes the floor with everything, even including Thorium, in the performance department (on Apple Silicon at least). Second, it's really beautiful with its new inline tab panel, where you have just one line of icons on top, instead of having two (tabs and url bar). DevTools are amazing. It can also connect to my iPhone's Safari via Wi-Fi and inspect the opened page — a must-have for heavy layouts. Plus, if my website works fine in Safari, it sure as hell will work fine everywhere. Safari is a great hack detector, as it won't tolerate dirty hacks. Works wonders for your code discipline.

Did you know that docker's ADD instruction uses "go-http-client/1.1" as user-agent when src is an URL?

I didn't. And since I'm unfortunate, enough so that this user-agent is blocked by my company, I've now spent twice the time it took me to write the whole dockerfile to identify the problem and fix it...

I love waisting my time for such minor things...

I just tried to download Photoshop CC. On Linux. Just to give it a try in Wine 3.0 and see if it works.

Adobe rejected my humble request with "Your operating system is not supported."

Ok.

I switched my user-agent to Windows and voila, it tried to give me a dmg installer.

A. Fucking. Mac. Installer.

WHAT AM I SUPPOSED DO TO WITH THAT ADOBE YOU STUPID CUNT!

Ranting in my winphone8.1 via web app and it is awesome!

Simply change the user agent to Firefox or chrome desktop and then go to
devrant.io/feed
Login, and enjoy!

I just started a new job last week. Old-school sysadmin role for a pretty old-school company, but the pay is nice and the kids've gotta eat.

They gave me a windows laptop. I haven't used windows for work or as a daily driver since 2016, and now, a week into trying to make this machine work for me, I have the following observations to report.

WSL is nice. It's nice to have it installed(though actually installing it was an adventure unto itself), and to set alacritty to open my default user prompt straight into that is very nice. As terminal emulators are by far my most used piece of software, that's nice to have.

Command-line software management through powershell, winget, and chocolatey are also very nice.

I like the accessibility offered by autohotkey, though there is something of a learning curve on it. Once I get better with it, I suspect that what follows will be largely mitigated.

The Bad:
In general, Windows is janky. It feels like it's all kinda taped together without any particular cohesion in mind. As a desktop, it feels decidedly amateur, compared to the feature-mountain polish of MacOS, and especially compared to the flexibility and infinite possibilities of Linux.

Lots of screen real estate is wasted, with window decorations, and fonts that look terrible at smaller sizes, because the antialiasing of fonts is just terrible. Almost all the features I depend on in other desktops: ad-hoc searches and launches(alfred, rofi) are-- again --janky. They work, but they typically require more typing than alfred or rofi. I admit I haven't spent weeks on this problem yet, but I haven't found a workable solution yet with wox, hain, and keypirinha. Quick searches like what you get with alfred, alfred workflows, and the swiss army knife that is rofi, just aren't possible or reliable with the tools I've used so far, and most require some kind of indexing agent to fully function.

It beggars imagination that a desktop in which users are subjected to "default apps" that is purported to be acceptable for enterprise, professional use, does not have a default entry for text editor. I installed nvim-qt, and I want to use it to edit anything and everything I ever edit with text, but all too often, apps have hard-coded instructions to open text files with notepad.

I want to open certain URLs with firefox, certain ones with firefox developer edition, and others with vivaldi, and yet there is not an app available that I have seen yet in my searches that allows me to set this kind of configuration. I found one that's supposed to, but it just ignores everything I put into its config, and just opens MS Edge for everything. Jank.

Simple things take too long. Like the delay between when I laboriously hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up the login and when the actual text field appears, and the delay between that and when I want to start using the computer.

Changing some settings requires a reboot. Updating some software requires a reboot. Updating permissions on something sometimes requires a reboot. And those are all on top of the frequent requests to reboot for updates.

I would have thought Windows would have overcome most of the issues that create these problems, but it's just, as I said, amateur.

I got lazy with my responsive site and iPadOS13 has come along to kick my ass.
It loads the iPad Pro 11” screen size but with a desktop user agent in safari.
Late night writing some ‘real’ css now.

I guess this is a rant at myself more than anything 🙉

My colleague:
Working in this job double as long as me.

Also my colleague:
isSafari = navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Safari") > -1 (pro tip: almost any browser but Firefox contains Safari in it's user agent, because browsers lie)

Also wasn't able to check if autoplaying a video fails. It's not my primary department, I'm just helping fixing bugs there. They really need an employee with knowledge and experience. The last and only one got fired, so...

I have review-style pages where I use h1, h2, and h3 to indicate the magnitude of a point I'm making. I liked it. I recently changed my template so it's all wrapped in an <article>, and just today I noticed that my h1s appear as h2s. Firefox wouldn't tell me what was going on, but Chromium let me see the relevant styles from the user agent style sheet, and WTF, h1s inside <article> or a few other semantic tags get styled to look exactly like h2s. WTF?!? I want my h1s back! But I don't want to pollute my stylesheet, and there isn't a good way to either, since I shouldn't be hardcoding the size of an h1 without hardcoding all the header sizes.

TFW the only thing stopping you from using Chrome on an archaic application is one-hundred lines of JavaScript. The typical user-agent switcher didn't even work.

how i learned what are browser user agent string?
i was learning web development and someone mentioned that term, and i was like yeah ok but deep down inside i was like why on earth would you need that?
few days after my father called me to see why his website(organisation's web protal to apply for leave) wasn't working(he thought i did something, beacuse i can code :/ ) and started scolding me that you did this, you are that and boy what a day that was, then after his speech, i learned that website said it worked best on IE 6,7 and that time IE 9 was latest and we were on windows 7 machine and I had no idea about how to get this done, and just like steve jobs said "you can't connect the dots looking forward" I googled how to change user string agent and told him that this browser has bug and you can solve it like this

Hi fellow devRanters, I need some advice on how to detect web traffic coming from bad/malicious bots and block them.

I have ELK (Elastic) stack set up to capture the logs from the sites, I have already blocked the ones that are obviously bad (bad user-agent, IP addresses known for spamming etc). I know you can tell by looking at how fast/frequently they crawl the site but how would I know if I block the one that's causing the malicious and non-human traffic? I am not sure if I should block access from other countries because I think the bots are from local.

I am lost, I don't know what else I can do - I can't use rate limiting on the sites and I can't sign up for a paid service cause management wants everything with the price of peanuts.

Rant:

Someone asked why I can't just read through the logs (from several mid-large scale websites) and pick out the baddies.

*facepalm* Here's the gigabytes log files.

Vivaldi browser seemed a good idea to escape Google's misfeatures without swapping it for Microsoft extensions (Edge) or Firefox / Gecko idiosyncrasies (size / magnification issues on Ubuntu, slow Android version, clunky UI). But there are some ongoing issues that I never experienced in any other user agent (maybe I will when switching to Chromium), like URL completion (port URLs without a protocol aren't prepended with https but trigger a xdg-open dialog, autocomplete prefers obscure deep links with long paths instead of the base URL, browsers seems to forget login passwords by default, etc.) - so Chromium seems like the obvious choice. But there seem to be no more Chromium builds for Android? Anyone else disappointed by Vivaldi has a preferred solution?

tried to use devrant.com on a mobile browser: login only possible when spoofing desktop user agent, although at first sight, the site seems to work well in a responsive view. After upvoting 2 posts, website keeps nagging to install the app and sends disfunctional redirects. How can any website be broken on mobile in 2021?