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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • I searched for the actual question text and found:

    Q19a. The immigrants entering the country illegally today are poisoning the blood of our country.

    The split was 14% completely agreed and 20% mostly agreed.

    I’m not as surprised by the results as the headline would have suggested because of the use of the word illegally. It biases the question negatively.

    The 20% who mostly agreed may have agreed with some negative connotation surrounding illegal immigration while ignoring the racism of “poisoning the blood.” In other words, if I put myself in the shoes of someone who feels strongly about securing the border, I could understand how those respondents would lean towards agree simply because of the use of the word “illegal.”

    To further support this interpretation: In the same survey, more than 40% of respondents favor or strongly favor building a wall along the US-Mexico border.

    Maybe I’m just optimistic that only around an eighth of the country is completely crazy and that is just a less clickbaity title.














  • That’s correct, it is just plain text and it can easily be spoofed. You should never perform an auth check of any kind with the user agent.

    In the above examples, it wouldn’t really matter if someone spoofed the header as there generally isn’t a benefit to the malicious agent.

    Where some sites get into trouble though is if they have an implicit auth check using user agents. An example could be a paywalled recipe site. They want the recipe to be indexed by Google. If I spoof my user agent to be Googlebot, I’ll get to view the recipe content they want indexed, bypassing the paywall.

    But, an example of a more reasonable use for checking user agent strings for bots might be regional redirects. If a new user comes to my site, maybe I want to redirect to a localized version at a different URL based on their country. However, I probably don’t want to do that if the agent is a bot, since the bot might be indexing a given URL from anywhere. If someone spoofed their user agent and they aren’t redirected, no big deal.