UserAgent spoofing
I don’t know about you, but I think it’s not appropriate that websites “block” some of their users based on their UserAgent. UserAgents are a “signature” that your web browser sends to the websites they visit to tell them what softaware they are. Yes, it’s like this that your online banking service can tell you to “Safari is not a supported browser, please use Firefox”.
Our superfeeder connects to websites to fetch their content (RSS feeds mainly). Of course, it sends them a UserAgent to tell them it’s actually Notifixious. The problem is that many website tend to “block” some user agents, or worse, to have a “whitelist” approach, where they only allow a given set of UserAgents. The question is : what should we do then? Spoof the user agent (send another one, accepted by the website) or, stay “legit” and accept not to get the content from them?
What would you do?
