That’s correct, it is just plain text and it can easily be spoofed. You should never perform an auth check of any kind with the user agent.

In the above examples, it wouldn’t really matter if someone spoofed the header as there generally isn’t a benefit to the malicious agent.

Where some sites get into trouble though is if they have an implicit auth check using user agents. An example could be a paywalled recipe site. They want the recipe to be indexed by Google. If I spoof my user agent to be Googlebot, I’ll get to view the recipe content they want indexed, bypassing the paywall.

But, an example of a more reasonable use for checking user agent strings for bots might be regional redirects. If a new user comes to my site, maybe I want to redirect to a localized version at a different URL based on their country. However, I probably don’t want to do that if the agent is a bot, since the bot might be indexing a given URL from anywhere. If someone spoofed their user agent and they aren’t redirected, no big deal.

User agents are useful for checking if the request was made by a (legitimate self-identifying) bot, such as Googlebot.

It could also be used in some specific scenarios where you control the client and want to easily identify your client traffic in request logs.

Or maybe you offer a download on your site and you want to reorder your list to highlight the most likely correct binary for the platform in the user agent.

There are plenty of reasonable uses for user agent that have nothing to do with feature detection.

This isn’t the evolution of C at all. It’s all just one language and you’re simply stuck in a lower dimension with a dimensionally compatible cross-section.

Those companies aren’t “the Internet.” They’re products connected to the Internet.

The OP argument is like saying the Internet is dead because Netflix is down.

Doubtful. By far, most servers responsible for Internet traffic are not running crowdstrike software.

This incident was a bunch of fortune 500 companies caught with their pants down.

The relative number here might be more useful as long as it’s understood that Google already has significant emissions. It’s also sufficient to convey that they’re headed in the wrong direction relative to their goal of net zero. A number like 14.3 million tCO₂e isn’t as clear IMO.

I do, friend. I do.

The distinction is web workers and offline mode.

It means your PWA can preload everything it needs to run offline, and you can actually use it offline. That is different from a “cached website” which can only cache the pages you’ve already visited and otherwise does not allow you to update data locally.

Yes, although that recently changed in the EU (only) with the Digital Markets Act.

You’re famous for being photographed shirtless on a horse. Is that because horses can’t judge you, or is it a new Russian policy for reducing laundry costs?

Can someone provide some context here? Why is he screaming at a coach?

Also side note: why is that even vaguely tolerable behavior for a professional sports player / role model?

I recently went through these exact pains trying to contribute to a project that exclusively ran through Discord and eventually had to give up when it was clear they would never enable issues in their GitHub repos for “reasons.”

It was impossible to discover the history behind anything. Even current information was lost within days, having to rehash aspects that were already investigated and decided upon.

0.1mm seems awfully thin for a double edged blade.

It’s also unreasonable to assume they will stack anywhere close to perfectly.

My guess is you’re off by at least a factor of 20.

I was thinking the same, but then realized it’s probably just quiche.

You’re right, “pounds” is ambiguous.

0lbs ≠ 0kg in the absence of gravity.

Do you understand how many computer programs will crash when you try to introduce a “month” consisting of a single day for this New Year holiday, or alternatively a day which does not have a corresponding month?

Is your Netflix subscription going to renew in December, and then next in January, or is there a troll of a month sitting in between where you’re charged for a day?

How many schedulers have rules like the second Tuesday of the month, or the last Friday of the month, and those days don’t even exist!

Is this special holiday even assigned a weekday? If it is, do we repeat the same weekday twice to keep the 28 day months on the same weekday schedule?

Madness! /S

I suspect these are using additional tools to guide the AI beyond a simple prompt. For example the spiraling medieval village was generated with stable diffusion and controlnet.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/dreamy-ai-generated-geometric-scenes-mesmerize-social-media-users/

But then that would be countered by the adblock-block-blocker ², also known as WEI.

There are two axes on the periodic table…