I talked to the Wikipedia sysadmin some time ago and there is a plan to switch to a new system which should be kept up to date more regularly. In general I think the browser vendors response to concerns about the user agent is to suggest using incognito mode. Christian ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Michael Catanzaro" <mcatanzaro@xxxxxxxxx> > To: desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Sent: Monday, September 28, 2015 11:39:31 AM > Subject: Re: Google Chrome User-Agent Extension > > On Mon, 2015-09-28 at 10:42 -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote: > > This bug was just brought to my attention: > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1266569 > > > > It appears that this extension is now installed by default on the > > Fedora Workstation release. I don't personally have a problem with > > this, but could someone please point me to where the decision was > > made > > and discussed so I can update the BZ and close it out? > > > It's to allow sites to collect of statistics on the number of Fedora > users, in particular Wikimedia [1]. (But notice the big red warning at > the top of the page, about that report not being maintained. I wonder > if we are still using this or not.) Note that for Firefox and > WebKitGTK+, we simply used patches rather than browser extensions. > > The disadvantage is that it does of course make your browser > fingerprint more unique, which caused me to hesitate at first, but I > think the privacy concerns are quite minimal. Servers already know > you're using non-Ubuntu Linux, which is a very, very small class of > users. [2] is very likely to show that your browser fingerprint is > unique (or almost unique) with or without Fedora in the user agent. And > none of that matters, because sites can use several forms of > supercookies (e.g. using HSTS database abuse, or using IndexedDB; > probably also with WebSQL or localstorage, not sure) to identify you > uniquely irrespective of any of this. The only possibly-significant > harm is that it informs the server that you're using Fedora rather than > some other distro. We can debate whether that should be kept private by > default, but I don't think so. :) > > [1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSy > stems.htm > [2] https://panopticlick.eff.org > > -- > desktop mailing list > desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
