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.
You must log in or # to comment.
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.
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.
Did you report the comment?
Yikes. That’s concerning.
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.
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.
That’s a massive yikes. Be sure to report shit like that.
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 .
But Linux DOES require more effort to set up than Windows. Who in the hell would deny that?
Removed by mod
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.
Maybe they think that saying “development difficulties” means it isn’t verbally abusive? lol
Removed by mod
so? who tf cares?
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.
deleted by creator
Until its your problem, lol.
Never has to be if they are an alt of someone in control of the instance.
Eh, I kind of see where he’s coming from. My response to threats like that is “have fun storming the castle, fuckface.”
Downvoters must not be Princess Bride fans.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
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.)
What else can admin see?
T H E F U T U R E
Why use scraper on Lemmy when bots can federate and have the data directly sent to them?
Everything they can get from Lemmy is public and not necessarily tied to any specific person. Like I’m not actually Helen’s lunch.
That’s exactly what Helen’s lunch would say.
That’s why I just say dumb shit on here.
Just look at how Reddit uses fingerprinting, absolutely part of their tracking
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.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
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.
“bad code change” describes pretty much every vide change they’ve done over the past 7ish years lol
I also don’t believe them. This was a test.
Or it was just a bug. You know, the thing that happens literally all the time in every codebase in the world
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.
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
Why are you still using that shitty site?
I say this as someone that was there since before the digg migration.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
What certain things could you really need it for that can’t be fulfilled by other internet means? Stop using that sorry ass site.
Actual insightful conversation on a variety of subjects. Especially current events, I notice this the most when discussing content updates in video games. While official forums exist a lot of the games I play essentially use their subreddit as a semi-official community with devs being active participants.
/r/eve and /r/pathofexile are great examples of this.
It’s hard to discount the success Reddit has had over the last decade or so positioning themselves as the “front page of the internet” giving people a forum to discuss all manner of subjects.
As I understand a lot of the hatred against Reddit and spez specifically comes from his attempts to monetize this phenomenon, not how effective/popular the site was.
This.
Ah, gaming. Got it. To me, it’s the opposite. I get insightful conversation in a variety of subjects here on Lemmy. I do check Reddit once in a while, though.
Edit: Downvoted by redditors? What are you doing on Lemmy, then? You’re not even OP!
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.
Now that Web Environment Integrity is shut down, Reddit decides to take matters into their own hands…
- please use something unique and descriptive
Best I can do is “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)”
Removed by mod
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.
What is JS?
Javascript
JavaScript, code that websites can run in your browser when you open them
If you’re on a website and you click a button and something happens other than going to a different page or downloading a file, it’s almost always because of JavaScript (JS)
It’s a programming language that’s built into most browsers that allows for interactive functionality. It’s implemented in a way that typically protects the security of the computer, because it doesn’t have access to the files on the computer or other sensitive things.
Because it can’t directly check a lot of things, browsers often provide a way for people writing websites to check what capabilities they can use.
This means there’s a way to ask "can I do 3d graphics using this particular feature?”.
The intent is so you can let your website handle computers that can’t do what you need, rather than just trying and crashing.Sufficiently determined people can ask for all of the various clues that are provided, and use that to make a pretty unique identifier for the computer, which they can then use to track you around the Internet.
Various ways of fixing this have been proposed, but they all fall short one way or another.
Either by making the web far less interactive than people have come to expect, making tracking easier but at least they’re not misusing the data, or requiring an unrealistic amount of reworking how the entire web works.
deleted by creator
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.
Same here on firefox mobile just started 10 minutes ago
Happened to me yesterday (Windows 11, Chrome latest version.) A simple wipe of my browser files fixed it.
I don’t even know how to use an API, let alone write code more complex than a For or Do Until loop in VBA, which I literally learned on the job to automate a finance task I was picking up.
Either Spez is turning paranoid that everyone and their mother is leeching off his data, or this was a critical bug.
RiF just kicked me out. I think reddit is trying to do another sweep to break unofficial apps/plug-ins/etc.
Patched boost still working can’t post as I’m temp banned for reporting spam
It was still working for you until now? I uninstalled it several weeks ago because I couldn’t get anything. Kinda makes me want to reinstall it and try again.
Infinity works last I checked, it just gets rate-limited really hard, so it’s hard to read comments. You also can’t sign in anymore, so no more interaction.
Patched Sync still working for me.
Glitch or not, fuck reddit
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.
deleted by creator
they’re trying to manage scrapping or the like. avoid that domain as much as you can
I’m sure this is exactly it, they want to stop any / all non official API access to prevent bots and scraping, I’m certain, it matches with their recent behaviors.
Still ongoing on multiple IP’s and different browsers. Plain Edge and their app works - so it seems that Chrome/Brave and FF are not welcome, which smells like a privacy issue. Well reddit - that was the last straw.
