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Ask HN: Why would www.economist.com block the Lynx UA?
Using the default lynx User Agent and visiting economist.com gives a 403. changing it to "firefox" allows me to visit the site. Why would they do such a UA based filtering?
- rahimnathwani 11y agoLynx is great for rendering text (99% of The Economist's content) but not so great for displaying images (100% of The Economist's ads). There's probably a simpler explanation involving no malice.
- theSage 11y agoThat's what I assumed... sigh.
- tedmiston 11y agoSometimes I use Lynx on text-heavy pages for readability (monospace feels easier on the eyes) and just to have a fully keyboard-driven browser, especially with the arrow keys. Just curious if that's your use case too?
- theSage 11y agoI ended up using Lynx because I have a data capped Internet plan. Loading all those pictures/ads eats away at my data limit.
- tedmiston 11y agoI've found Opera Mini in turbo mode on mobile especially good for that use case. It's my default browser anytime I'm traveling with just a few hundred megs of cell data to last several weeks.
- theSage 11y agoAFAIK Opera Mini routes traffic through it's own servers to provide a low budget site. I'd do that only if I was in a really tight corner. But it does work wonders for the data usage.
- SyneRyder 11y agoI have blocked a version of Lynx on my own site - there was a scraper tool using Lynx as the User Agent, presumably as a way of requesting the most scraper friendly version of the site. Somehow I traced it back to a pirate/cracking group using the scraper to monitor my site for software updates, so they had the best chance of releasing 0-day cracks of my software. (Should've been easy for them to work around, but I guess I'm small enough that it wasn't worth their time.) Lynx itself is awesome though, I used to use it a lot in my University days.
- theSage 11y agoThat never came to mind. I'm going to believe that they took a similar decision.