Consider for a moment a typical User-Agent string sent by a Debian web browser:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070802 Iceape/1.1.4 (Debian-1.1.4-1) Unfortunately, the fact that this information identifies a specific package and version of that package means that Debian users (already a select group) have their browsing identities further distinguished by their User-Agent strings. This means, in practice, that many sites will be able to track Debian users by their User-Agent, even if (say) the user is blocking cookies or limiting them to a single session and is changing IP address regularly. What do people think of picking a single User-Agent string for all versions of all of Debian's Gecko-based browsers? Would there be any serious harm in terms of browser debugging? Are there many sites which usefully treat different Gecko browsers differently? As a far more hypothetical question, what would people think of picking a single User-Agent for Gecko-based browsers for a larger set of GNU/Linux distributions? Obviously, there is much more politics there, because any distributions that joined would be losing the ability to measure their desktop market share by looking at web statistics. -- Peter Eckersley [EMAIL PROTECTED] Staff Technologist Tel +1 415 436 9333 x131 Electronic Frontier Foundation Fax +1 415 436 9993 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]