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Date:      Thu, 26 Apr 2001 10:54:35 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
To:        ignacio <izelaya@infovia.com.ar>
Cc:        "freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG" <freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   User-Agent
Message-ID:  <200104261454.KAA21751@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <3AE7F976.D6F3CAC2@infovia.com.ar>
References:  <3AE7F976.D6F3CAC2@infovia.com.ar>

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<<On Thu, 26 Apr 2001 07:33:26 -0300, ignacio <izelaya@infovia.com.ar> said:

> 2) How can I hide that info.

Use a proxy such as squid.  I run two proxies: one that completely
anonymizes the headers, and one that doesn't.  (The former is vastly
more popular.)  The anonymizing proxy is configured to supply:

User-Agent: ANONYM/1.0 (ITS; KL-10)

(something of an in-joke).  It used to be configured not to supply any
User-Agent header, but then I ran into a broken Web site (I think
IMDB) which absolutely insisted on getting one, so I made something up
for its benefit.

If you do this, you will run into many Web sites which (in violation
of standards) use the User-Agent header to determine which content to
serve to you -- or, as happens more often, which content to refuse to
serve to you.  For this reason, it's probably safest to pretend that
you are running IE5 on Win98.

What this has to do with security I have no idea, so please move
follow-ups to a more appropriate mailing-list.

-GAWollman


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