this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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Re the blocking of fake useragents, what people could try is see if there are things older useagents do (or do wrong) which these do not. I heard of some companies doing that. (Long ago I also heard of somebody using that to catch mmo bots in a specific game. There was a packet that if the server send it to a legit client, the client crashed, a bot did not). I'd assume the specifics are treated as secret just because you don't want the scrapers to find out.
You could probably do something by getting into the weeds of browser updates, at least for web traffic. Like, if they're showing themselves as an older version of chrome send a badly formatted cookie to crash it? Redirect to /%%30%30?
Yes, there I heard there is some javascript that various older versions of chrome/firefox don't properly execute for example. So you can use that to determine which version they are (as long as nobody shares that javascript with the public. So this might even not be javascript, I honestly know nothing about it just heard it).