Started to get this message when accessing Reddit. I use LibreWolf as a browser, which does indeed provide a more generic user agent to combat fingerprinting, but nothing out of the ordinary either (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0). Anyone else experiencing this?

Edit: seems to have resolved itself. Thanks for confirming I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Let’s hope this isn’t some new algorithm to test if for insufficient fingerprinting so Reddit can kick ad-resistant users.

  • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world
    21912·
    11 months ago

    Reddit is corrupt. It probably has something to do with them wanting to track you, and they can’t track you if you have a blank user agent.

    Stay here at Lemmy where humans are respected as humans instead of data mines. Life is more dignified here at Lemmy.

    • KrummsHairyBalls@lemmy.ca
      356·
      11 months ago

      Stay here at Lemmy where humans are respected as humans

      I saw a post a few days ago where one Lemmy user threatened to triangulate another user via IP, and then hurt them, because they said Linux doesn’t work out of the box as well as windows in their experience.

      This was on a main instance. The person didn’t get in any trouble.

      • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
        5·
        11 months ago

        Was it a shit post? Don’t mistake me as being dismissive of threats, it’s just that “triangulate based on IP” sounds like a joke.

        • KrummsHairyBalls@lemmy.ca
          6·
          11 months ago

          No, unfortunately. The guy seemed really mad. Calling the other guy a moron, idiot, and telling him to apologise. From what I could see from the comments, it seems like the one guy visited the angry guys website, and the guy threatened to use his IP to find out where he lived. Then used threats about how it’s nice to sleep at night without fear, and that if you piss the wrong people off you’ll know.

          All because the guy was having Linux issues and said windows worked better for them. I only found the thread because I’m also having the same issues lol.

          • 🐑🇸 🇭 🇪 🇪 🇵 🇱 🇪🐑@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            11 months ago

            The mad guy sounds tech illiterate anyway. Nowadays you can’t track people by IP anymore. Sure you get a city, maybe a city district and then what?

            To prove my point, here’s where my IP (Without VPN) will tell you where I live: Berlin. I live on the other side of the country compared to Berlin.

            These scriptkiddies are so pathetic .

      • Aux@lemmy.world
        819·
        11 months ago

        Yeah, Lemmy is full of shit heads and mods/admins rarely care. You can also see plenty of misogyny, non stop verbal abuse, etc. Lemmy is basically a playground for 13 year olds with development difficulties.

        • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          112·
          11 months ago

          You can also see plenty of misogyny, non stop verbal abuse, etc.

          Lemmy is basically a playground for 13 year olds with development difficulties.

          I’m just going to highlight these two sentences, and ask you think really really hard about why this comment has more downvotes than upvotes.

        • KrummsHairyBalls@lemmy.ca
          232·
          11 months ago

          Damn. Lemmy is hella doomed when a response to an insane thing someone else did on Lemmy is “who the fuck cares?”.

          Didn’t realize you support people threatening others based on a comment about an operating system.

              • Xeknos@lemmy.world
                55·
                11 months ago

                Eh, I kind of see where he’s coming from. My response to threats like that is “have fun storming the castle, fuckface.”

                • StupidBrotherInLaw@lemmy.world
                  131·
                  11 months ago

                  For someone who doesn’t care, you sure can’t shut up about it.

                  Look how little I care guys. Hey you. Yeah, you. Did you know I don’t care? Totally don’t, 110%. Make sure to tell your friends how few fucks I give about all of this.

                  Why am I still talking about it? Clearly because I care so little. I learned early on that the more you talk about something, the less you care. My utter inability to stop talking about it is the supreme sign of my achieving the pinnacle of carelessness.

    • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.worldEnglish
      271·
      11 months ago

      Stay here at Lemmy where humans are respected as humans instead of data mines. Life is more dignified here at Lemmy.

      I like the sentiment, but it is so incredibly naive to think that there aren’t crawlers scraping every ounce of data from Lemmy as possible. While Lemmy itself may not be collecting user data (depending on who is hosting your home instances of choice), other data that is valuable can still be collected, particularly for LLM AI.

      If you can access it, the data scrapers have already crawled it.

      • DasAlbatross@lemmy.worldEnglish
        151·
        11 months ago

        Especially considering the post from a little while ago showing that admins of Lemmy instances can see what individual users are upvoting and downvoting. There’s nothing to stop a bad actor from setting up an instance and just harvesting data.

        • Rolando@lemmy.world
          71·
          11 months ago

          admins of Lemmy instances can see what individual users are upvoting and downvoting

          Everyone can see that via kbin. for example, here’s your comment.

          (not sure about downvotes… you might have to work a bit more to see those.)

      • helenslunch@feddit.nl
        71·
        11 months ago

        Everything they can get from Lemmy is public and not necessarily tied to any specific person. Like I’m not actually Helen’s lunch.

    • Fades@lemmy.world
      141·
      11 months ago

      Just look at how Reddit uses fingerprinting, absolutely part of their tracking

    • Claidheamh@slrpnk.net
      10·
      11 months ago

      and they can’t track you if you have a blank user agent.

      They absolutely can. A blank user agent is a fingerprint like any other.

  • ZeroCool@feddit.chEnglish
    741·
    11 months ago

    https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/17vbyr8/whoa_there_pardner_error_message/

    Text:

    Hey all!

    It looks like most of you had difficulty reaching the site for about 5 minutes, but those issues should have subsided.

    During that time, you may have been shown an incorrect error message that read:

    Whoa there, pardner! reddit's awesome and all, but you may have a bit of a problem.

Make sure your User-Agent is not empty, is something unique and descriptive and try again. if you're supplying an alternate User-Agent string, try changing back to default as that can sometimes result in a block.

    To share some additional context on what happened - we pushed a bad code change in our tooling that resulted in a significant amount of users getting blocked without doing anything wrong. So if you happened to see that error message within the last hour, don’t fret! We’ve reverted the code change that caused this error and things should be back to normal very soon if they aren’t already.

    • brax@sh.itjust.works
      483·
      11 months ago

      “bad code change” describes pretty much every vide change they’ve done over the past 7ish years lol

        • Stumblinbear@pawb.social
          23·
          11 months ago

          Or it was just a bug. You know, the thing that happens literally all the time in every codebase in the world

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
            42·
            11 months ago

            Maybe, but this is exactly the sort of thing I would expect them to do a test run for. They are desperate to stop ad-blocking.

            • Stumblinbear@pawb.social
              1·
              11 months ago

              Tests and QA don’t catch everything. From what I can tell this affects a small percent of users, so it’s very likely that it slipped through any testing that was done if that’s the case

  • alienzx@feddit.nlEnglish
    573·
    11 months ago

    Why are you still using that shitty site?

    I say this as someone that was there since before the digg migration.

    • ChimaericDesire@lemmynsfw.com
      361·
      11 months ago

      I hate using it, but there are some things I just can’t find info on anywhere else. Reddit is always a last resort, but it frequently turns out to be the only resource.

      • MuuuaadDib@lemm.ee
        61·
        11 months ago

        Yup, sadly I need to use it for certain things. I have asked for my ban to be reversed from some salty mod, but they will not reply. Hello Opera and VPN and I can go comment and not care.

        • El Barto@lemmy.world
          35·
          11 months ago

          What certain things could you really need it for that can’t be fulfilled by other internet means? Stop using that sorry ass site.

          • MuuuaadDib@lemm.ee
            2·
            11 months ago

            For one I was playing MW3 the other day and the FOV glitch kept coming up. I was super annoyed by it did a search and bingo a person put the solution of the sub. Shit like that.

  • pastaPersona@lemmy.world
    532·
    11 months ago

    Wish they would at least be honest in their messaging, the whole “quirky” official reddit branding doesn’t really work anymore now that they’ve gone full corporate mode

  • aes@lemm.eeEnglish
    331·
    11 months ago

    Now that Web Environment Integrity is shut down, Reddit decides to take matters into their own hands…

  • vsh@lemm.eeEnglish
    30·
    11 months ago

    Happened to me as well. Holy shit. Are they trying to nuke web scrappers/robots now? Whatever that is, it’s no good.

    • John Richard@lemmy.world
      164·
      11 months ago

      I honestly don’t think it has anything to do with that. Scrapers going to scrape. They just want more metadata to identify you and know what propaganda to feed to you based on our online habits. The amount of techniques to identify someone based on JS alone should stir a rebellion, but we just accept it. If you have JS enabled, I can tell you what OS you use, what kind of processor you have, info about your graphics card, monitor resolution, etc. I can even identify you based on how your computer renders graphics. Oh, you’ve disabled JS and opted out of us tracking you based on X, Y, Z… great, now we can identify you based on your privacy settings.

    • __ghost__@lemmy.ml
      371·
      11 months ago

      Little descriptor your browser has to tell websites what it is and where it comes from

      • Wes_Dev@lemmy.ml
        681·
        11 months ago

        It also tells the website the OS you’re running, as well as the browser, and various version numbers of stuff.

        One interesting experiment is to use a user agent changer to view a website, and watch how the website changes every time you load a new user agent.

        Google will remove search options if you’re using Firefox (mobile?), for example. But if you change your user agent to say you have Chrome, even if you are actually using Firefox, those options magically come back and work. It’s almost as if that’s anti-competitive behavior or something…

        It’s also how a lot of websites know whether or not to give you Windows executables or Mac executables, or Linux executables, etc.

          • Wes_Dev@lemmy.ml
            1·
            11 months ago

            Brilliant example. I think some of the search tools like date range or image color also get removed with the Firefox user agent, but I don’t quite remember.

        • TunaCowboy@lemmy.world
          91·
          11 months ago

          It also tells the website the OS you’re running, as well as the browser, and various version numbers of stuff

          While it’s true that many browsers choose to follow a convention that includes that info, User-Agent is just a string, so something like fuku is a legitimate UA

          https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1945#section-10.15

          curl -vA fuku example.com 2>&1 | grep -E '^[<>] (User|HTTP)'
        • Wrench@lemmy.world
          52·
          11 months ago

          Before the paranoid think it’s invasive, it’s used mainly to tell the website what your browsers capabilities are, so that features work and render properly. And by “tell the website”, I mean they generally serve the same “code” to everyone, and your browser just uses different parts of it.

          It’s not as big of a deal now, but browsers used to render things very differently and had unique style features. Safari is still a big offender of this.

          The above Google search features probably means the developers being Google, probably just thoroughly tested the more niche features on Chrome. And probably at some point, other browsers like Safari shit the bed (common) because they used features that Safari didn’t support at the time, and decided to just disable them for Safari.

          • Ziglin@lemmy.world
            31·
            11 months ago

            I think that they probably made it so their app looks nicer and want chrome to match, anyway then there’s apps that just block you if you’re not using chromium or derivatives, despite working on the browser you’re using. Ahem Ms-teams and another video conferencing software that I had to use.

          • joel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            31·
            11 months ago

            Yeah I didn’t think disabling features for Firefox users would make sense. The user would have to know you’re punishing them for it to be effective at incentivising them to switch to chrome.

            I personally don’t trust Google anyway and mainly just use duckduckgo.

        • lud@lemm.ee
          42·
          11 months ago

          Google also changes a bunch of features if you change the user agent to some really old or non existent browser versions.

          I don’t think they are making Firefox worse on purpose. I think it’s just something they don’t bother to fix.

  • ugh@lemm.ee
    201·
    11 months ago

    RiF just kicked me out. I think reddit is trying to do another sweep to break unofficial apps/plug-ins/etc.

  • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
    18·
    11 months ago

    Couldn’t find any explanation on Google so I tried emailing them about this. I got back this lovely gem:

    Reddit Support (Reddit Support) Nov 14, 2023, 15:29 PST

    Hi there!

    Thanks for contacting us! At this time, we are not currently accepting inquiries via email. If you need support with our API or have questions, please submit your request here.

    Cheers, Your friends at Reddit

    But VPN worked.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    142·
    11 months ago

    Let’s hope this isn’t some new algorithm to test if for insufficient fingerprinting so Reddit can kick ad-resistant users.

    Oh, it is. I assure you. Anything but lose ad revenue.