Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

It's curious though, that the thread narrows it down to "X11; Linux", with that specific casing (update: nope, not case sensitive). Changing or removing any single char in that string stops the error.

View on HN

Could it be that they identified a crash/vuln that involves X11 on Linux, or DDoS, or ATO, and proactively block that as an emergency mitigation?

I still vote for a filter gone awry, no need to be needlessly conspiracist.

They most likely had a reason to threat those people differently and a bug came up under that special case ;) Watch them fix it.

Ah, yes, I concur with that. I thought you meant some generic parsing error related to the user agent string.

I agree with the first sentence, but would advise against holding your breath until they have fixed it.

s/threat/treat/, though.

From the first comment of TFA:

> If I lowercase the 'L' it fails

so no, not that specific casing.

Ah, yeah. My head read failed as "failed to fail". Updated my comment.

Same, I read it twice to be sure because of the cognitive dissonance!

What browsers on Linux produce a User-agent containing that exact string _by default_, without user customization?

EDIT: Elsewhere in thread confirms Firefox and Chrome affected on lots of Linux.

Mine only contains "X11; Fedora; Linux".

I picked that up from the linked thread: 'So they're sniffing for "X11; Linux"'

Maybe just an oversimplified explanation, and it cares only about "X11;" and "Linux", regardless of whether they are together or not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com