It really hits home the point of how shitty the web has become. Ad companies and malware distributors come up with bad and worse ways to interfere with my browsing, and the “good guys” need to match with increasingly invasive and fragile anti measures.

Sort of like having to take of your shoes when you board a plane. If that’s what it takes, isn’t it just better to stay home?

> Sort of like having to take of your shoes when you board a plane. If that’s what it takes, isn’t it just better to stay home?

Removal of shoes, 'naked' full body scanners, these are all terrible, and I tell myself every time it isn't worth the hassle.

The reality is that as much as I hate it, I'm still flying every other week.

I'm also on the Internet daily. I don't see that changing.

Honestly what is the point of user-agent at all if it needs to be set to some changing, magical incantation in order for a browser (or any other agent) to be functional?

I hate the direction the internet and tech is going, and I hate even more that I'm seemingly powerless to do anything about it

for me it did change. I stopped flying and I stopped visiting websites which won't accept my tracking blockers.

You need it for work. Meanwhile, TSA has caused more overall economic damage than the 9/11 plane crashes.

Welcome to this brave new world where technology is accessible to all.

I hate it.

Indeed - I travel by train as much as I can.

The web sucks. Society/civilization is shaking in its foundations.

I just wish the passive non-violent approach would work. It worked for Gandhi, but in this day?

I feel we're all getting overrun by technology. Unfortunately, as it could have been the opposite.

You'd be surprised. The /good/ bots do this, but there's a lot of white noise garbage that simple techniques do still filter out.

Speaking from experience: there are a ton of bots that don't set UA and use whatever their request library sets.

Pure conjecture: The "security solution" probably wanted to ban the user for a reason unrelated to the UA string, and was only able to (i.e., the user was only identifiable uniquely enough) because of the odd UA string. Switching to the standard UA string places the user into a state sufficiently non-unique as to be unidentifiable and thus unblockable.