Is it Firefox that gives out all my details?
I made a simple purchase online - totally kosher, company I've dealt with before etc.
When the email acknowledgement arrived it had at the bottom:
IP Address: 86.29.54.57 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0
So is it Firefox that makes this information available as I'd be surprised if the server at the other end could interrogate my computer - I have the firewall on? And can it be turned off? And what's "Gecko"?
I'm not worried about it in this instance but I don't see why places I visit should consider it important that I have a Mac and what version my OSX is! Spooky really!
Избрано решение
Every browser sends "user agent" information unless you block it. Here's mine (from Help > Troubleshooting Information):
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0
In most cases, blocking the user agent (or impersonating a different browser/OS) doesn't have any serious consequence, but in some cases web sites will refuse to display or will dumb themselves down if they don't get user agent information for a recent browser or a supported OS.
To experiment with changing your user agent information, try this add-on: User Agent Switcher :: Add-ons for Firefox.
And by the way, "Gecko" is the HTML rendering engine in Mozilla products.
As for the IP address, the web server needs a reply-to IP address in order to sustain a connection. If you want to hide your true IP address, you need to use a proxy or VPN service such as Anonymizer, or an "onion routing" service.
Прочетете този отговор в контекста 👍 0Всички отговори (5)
Избрано решение
Every browser sends "user agent" information unless you block it. Here's mine (from Help > Troubleshooting Information):
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0
In most cases, blocking the user agent (or impersonating a different browser/OS) doesn't have any serious consequence, but in some cases web sites will refuse to display or will dumb themselves down if they don't get user agent information for a recent browser or a supported OS.
To experiment with changing your user agent information, try this add-on: User Agent Switcher :: Add-ons for Firefox.
And by the way, "Gecko" is the HTML rendering engine in Mozilla products.
As for the IP address, the web server needs a reply-to IP address in order to sustain a connection. If you want to hide your true IP address, you need to use a proxy or VPN service such as Anonymizer, or an "onion routing" service.
Every web server that you visit can read your IP because that is your internet address and the server needs to know that to send data back to you.
What Is My IP Address:
Gecko is the Firefox rendering engine that is part of the user agent.
- Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0
If you want to get even more nervous about what web sites can learn about your browser, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Panopticlick" site: http://panopticlick.eff.org/
Thanks for that! Yes, I'm OK on the IP address - if you trace it it's just in one of my ISP's clusters anyway. I'm am old - both as in "aged" and "fashioned" - and when I was young you wrote letters which you headed with your postal address. So the IP address is fine. But you didn't say which brand of fountain pen you were using or whether you were writing on scrap paper or Basildon Bond's finest! I understand websites need to know what your browser is capable of (roll on HTML5) but why should the fact that I have a Mac running OSX 6 make any difference?!?! I'll try the link you suggest. I wonder if I can tell it I'm using Acorn RiscOS 3.1 and !Browse!!!!!
Thanks jscher2000 (I feel I should add a magical Escher staircase). I sort of generally replied to the other helpful people a moment ago, but I think I'll try your link in the morning when the effects of the Taylor's Port have gone - gout's one thing, your link might be nearer a coronary.