
Ask HN: Why would www.economist.com block the Lynx UA? - theSage
Using the default lynx User Agent and visiting economist.com gives a 403. changing it to &quot;firefox&quot; allows me to visit the site. Why would they do such a UA based filtering?
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rahimnathwani
Lynx is great for rendering text (99% of The Economist's content) but not so
great for displaying images (100% of The Economist's ads).

There's probably a simpler explanation involving no malice.

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theSage
That's what I assumed... sigh.

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tedmiston
Sometimes I use Lynx on text-heavy pages for readability (monospace feels
easier on the eyes) and just to have a fully keyboard-driven browser,
especially with the arrow keys. Just curious if that's your use case too?

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theSage
I ended up using Lynx because I have a data capped Internet plan. Loading all
those pictures/ads eats away at my data limit.

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tedmiston
I've found Opera Mini in turbo mode on mobile especially good for that use
case. It's my default browser anytime I'm traveling with just a few hundred
megs of cell data to last several weeks.

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theSage
AFAIK Opera Mini routes traffic through it's own servers to provide a low
budget site. I'd do that only if I was in a really tight corner. But it does
work wonders for the data usage.

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SyneRyder
I have blocked a version of Lynx on my own site - there was a scraper tool
using Lynx as the User Agent, presumably as a way of requesting the most
scraper friendly version of the site. Somehow I traced it back to a
pirate/cracking group using the scraper to monitor my site for software
updates, so they had the best chance of releasing 0-day cracks of my software.
(Should've been easy for them to work around, but I guess I'm small enough
that it wasn't worth their time.)

Lynx itself is awesome though, I used to use it a lot in my University days.

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theSage
That never came to mind. I'm going to believe that they took a similar
decision.

