[conspire] Google announces blocking logins from non-approved browsers

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

> On Nov 21, 2020, at 13:59, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> 
> Quoting Dire Red (deirdre at deirdre.net):
> 
>> This probably affects more than KDE/Gnome-based browsers.
>> 
>> https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2020-November/031604.html <https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2020-November/031604.html>
> 
> WTAF?  The broad damage to users that will ensue includes shutting the
> door to people reaching the Web behind app-level proxy gateways for 
> security and monitoring purposes.
> 
> Good thing I'm not dependent on Google Account login.

I use it for a few things, including an authenticator login.

To point out *how* absurd this is, here are the UserAgent strings for the three browsers I currently have installed on my main laptop:

Safari:

[23/Nov/2020:18:14:32 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 10657 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.0.1 Safari/605.1.15"


Google Chrome:

[23/Nov/2020:18:15:49 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 10657 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 11_0_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.198 Safari/537.36"


Mozilla Firefox:

[23/Nov/2020:18:17:51 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 10657 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.16; rv:82.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/82.0"

The *only* one that is 100% straight about what browser it is is Firefox. This is because of historical “rendering pages differently” based on user agent strings (or banning browsing a site altogether), and thus Karsten Self’s practice of setting his UserAgent string to “Stop fucking obsessing over UserAgent strings.”

Ob This Page Optimized for Arguing With Customers: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Web/opti.html

Deirdre