fake user agent

[Janina Sajka]

I found that I had block-cursor checked. Per Kenny's instructions, I've
now unchecked it, but haven't yet tried any pages. Soon, and I'll
report.

The business of faking the user agent is an old and honorable trick in
the user-agent domain. There are far too many stupid sites that don't
want to display content to user agents who don't identify the way they
want. Bank of America, for example, recently displayed a page to me
saying that I should come back with a user agent that supports 128-bit
SSL.

Such tests are, of course, themselves fake. Were BofA actually testing
my browser's encryption, whuich can be done technologically, they'd know
my user agent significantly exceeds this minimal 128-bit threshold,
which happens to be the best that IE does these days. I'm at 192-bit,
thank you very much.

But, they're not testing encryption as their error message claims.
Rather, they're looking at the user agent declaration and jumping to
erronaeous conclusions--a dangerous and insecure practice on its own.

PS: I set my user agent to Mozilla-1.0.1 and got in.

Cheryl Homiak writes:
> From: Cheryl Homiak <chomiak at chartermi.net>
> 
> Is this a links problem or a speakup problem or a combination, i wonder. because
> I can cursor track in braille with links2.1; at least, the cursor moves to the
> link I'm on.
> 
> Cheryl
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175