Cisco Fixes RV320/RV325 Vulnerability by Banning “curl” in User-Agent

Re:Cisco Fixes RV320/RV325 Vulnerability by Banning “curl” i... by jrochkind1 on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @09:53PM (#19508401)

There is presumably some way, at least hypothetically, to fix the mess that User-Agent has become. (Everybody is 'Mozilla' now! And yet somehow a unique snowflake 'Mozilla' that lets you be tracked...)

But it's not quite that. It's not that a device is "mobile" instead of "stationary" that matters. It's maybe that it's a touch screen. It's maybe that it's a small screen. (With an especially uneven aspect ratio?) Maybe that it's handheld. It's maybe the combination of all of those things. But it's not really that it's "mobile" exactly. And there are, and possibly will be increasing proportions of, devices that have some but not all of these qualities we package together in our brains as 'typical mobile'

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Re:Cisco Fixes RV320/RV325 Vulnerability by Banning “curl” i... by realusername on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @10:20PM (#19508575)

All of those small differences of mobile devices are better served by media queries I personally think. You could replace "mobile" in my example by "small-screen" if you prefer.

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Re:Cisco Fixes RV320/RV325 Vulnerability by Banning “curl” i... by jrochkind1 on Thursday March 28, 2019 @09:59AM (#19512223)

Agreed. Media queries need to be improved though. There are no good media queries to detect "touch screen" and/or "no keyboard or mouse/pointer, only touch screen", only JS hacks that attempt it. This can matter. But yes, improving media query (or input method query?) APIs for both CSS and JS is, I agree, the correct solution to User-Agent madness. It's just not entirely straightforward or obvious or easy, and as always getting all browsers on the same page is an issue.

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