Hacker News Reader

Fedora did this for a while to inject the word "Fedora" into the User Agent. They eventually stopped because users were similarly spooked.

View on HN

Putting even more identifying information into User Agent strings seems completely insane, who's interests is that meant to serve? The number of people in any town with Fedora in their UA must be minuscule, that blows a huge number of 'privacy bits', and for what?

I think it's for installation tracking to some degree -- they do this by the browser user agents but _also_ machine-ids sent with DNF (the package manager)

I love the project, I really dislike this 'gather things that might be useful to someone' behavior and having to MITM my system to see what it's actually doing

They still do it

I'm on a fresh install of Fedora 36 (KDE Spin) and my Firefox UA is currently showing as "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:103.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/103.0".

cool, so don't switch to chromium. then the internet will know you run fedora.

I mean all he has to do is to uninstall fedora-chromium-config

Reply on news.ycombinator.com