Dear Paul, On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 11:04:16AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > > Ah, I miswrote. What I meant was, that if you use vanilla Iceweasel, > > you can already tell that that hit was from a Debian machine. You do > > need a user-agent swticher (or equivalent), as you rightly say, to > > switch what is sent as user-agent. > > AFAICT, that isn't true, unless you think that Iceweasel will never be > available on non-Debian platforms.
You are right. > > Currently, if I use Iceweasel to search on Google using it's default > > home page, it appends a "client=iceweasel-a". Do you imply that this > > setting should be reverted? > > This thread is about DDG, so your question is OT. I don't use the > Iceweasel search widget, so it doesn't affect me, but I would think > the User-Agent HTTP header is enough to let Google know which web > browser users are using. If the client= parameter has some affect on > money, it really should be named properly. Well, I'd disagree here. The question is whether we wish to have settings which reveal to a webmaster what settings are being used. By default, Iceweasel in Debian does provide an indication to Google that the query is likely from a Debian machine; whether Google is using that or not is a different matter, but that information is being provided anyway. One way to look at this would be to ask why this could not be repeated with DDG (adding a client= or the like). Or, an alternate way to maintain consistency would be to remove the client= for Google as well (without loss of functionality?). > > In other words, are you not strictly opposed to them looking for these > > strings and finding them, but it should be up to the user to decide > > whether or not they would like these strings identifying Debian to be > > sent. Is that correct? > > No. Whether or not browsers should identify the OS they are running on > is not part of my point (I think they should not). My point is that > where the money goes should be a choice of the user, with the default > suggested to the user determined by upstream. Debian should exert no > influence over that choice, except maybe asking upstream to add us to > the choices available to the user. I agree with this. Thank you. Kumar -- "...very few phenomena can pull someone out of Deep Hack Mode, with two noted exceptions: being struck by lightning, or worse, your *computer* being struck by lightning." (By Matt Welsh) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
