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The Internet is full of bots. It is full of corporate bots that scrape data for AI. It is full of government surveillance. It is full of North Korean Lazarus ha

The Internet is full of bots. It is full of corporate bots that scrape data for AI. It is full of government surveillance. It is full of North Korean Lazarus hackers. It is also full of tech enthusiasts that have various projects. It is full of people that use various RSS readers. I often am repulsed that servers reads user agent. It is often not used for compatibility reasons, but just to detect if you are running official browser, or if you are 'privileged user'. This leads, obviously, that some programs needs to use disguise, which would not happen if servers were friendly toward friendly bots. Imho there is a problem with bad-bots, not all bots, that take away your bandwidth, processing power, etc. etc.

ollybee 2y ago
"I often am repulsed that servers reads user agent." That is a backwards way of looking at it, they dont take the user agent, you give it. You you give any user agent you like or none. No one providing a free resource online has any obligation to treat your requests in a particular way. If you dont like the way a particular HTTP service is responding, then dont send it requests.
- Joker_vD 2y ago
  The thing is, I've seen quite several web servers that refuse to serve your request unless you provide any User-Agent, and I mean any: it can even be "}__test|O:21:\" (which is not a valid UA), but it can't be missing. Yeah, sure, very security, much protection.