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Re: [tor-talk] Importance of individual useragent items



On 6/23/2014 2:57 PM, Jeremy Rand wrote:
On 06/23/2014 12:11 PM, Joe Btfsplk wrote:
I noticed there are at least 2 different references in Torbrowser for
useragent over ride strings.

The Panopticlick site picks up this one: "/Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1;
rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0/," though there's another shown in
about:config: extensions.torbutton.useragent_override;Mozilla/5.0
(Windows NT 6.1; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0.

Aside from the fact there are 2 strings shown in about:config, the
string that Panopticlick detects shows Windows 7 (32 bit - I assume).

Several Windows usage by version sites show Win 7 64 bit as much more
common.  If true, why doesn't Torbrowser use that in its useragent?

The string in Torbrowser may be one of the most common setups? Some
"useragent info" sites show 64 bit OSes are more common in the string.
In my 1st visit to Panopticlick in a long time, using Torbrowser - it
showed

Browser Characteristic:  User Agent
bits of identifying information:  6.73
one in x browsers have this value:  105.86
value: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0

For the useragent string alone, 1 in 106 is pretty low.

To my knowledge TorBrowser doesn't try to hide the fact that it's
TorBrowser.  As long as all TorBrowsers are the same (which I assume is
the case), then it shouldn't affect the anonymity set unless I'm mistaken.

Thanks.

Other than the fact that accessing sites comes from Tor exit nodes, they could easily spoof the useragent the same as one of the most popular strings. That may / may not be of any value, depending on how many sites check for Tor exits. Creating a set of only Tor users definitely limits the number of users to get lost among, especially at sites w/o many Tor users.

Maybe Tor devs aren't able to blend w/ general internet users, so the selected Torbrowser useragent isn't that important.
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