this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
60 points (98.4% liked)

Linux

48372 readers
1123 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I usually use Tor Browser to scan files online for viruses, which I then send to Windows users (I use Linux) if they are clean.

Lately, I've noticed that the User Agent in TOR is showing up as Linux, when it used to show up as Windows.

Is this a problem with my system or a change made by the TOR team? The fact that Linux has far fewer users increases fingerprinting.

top 9 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Yes, Tor recently made a change to that. This does increase fingerprinting but not by much. A lot of Tor users are using Linux rather than Windows.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

Using TOR Browser, my user agent is:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/128.0

... so I confirm that Windows is not spoofed now, if ever it were.

You can see what Web hosts see. Visit:

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Does it increase fingerprinting? I imagine there might be some non-user-agent way to determine the OS. Like with image handling or whatever.

It's probably more unique and suspicious for a linux browser to pretend to be Windows than a Linux system disclosing itself as Linux.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago

Pretty sure the TOR user agent is just default firefox, by design. It's very easy to detect OS with very rudimentary fingerprinting techniques, a lot of which are blocked by the TOR browser but they can never get them all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Like with image handling or whatever.

I'd expect TOR browser to mitigate this. Canvas2D is disabled for instance and system fonts aren't exposed.

Most other things could be mitigated by making every platform use the same code paths for e.g. font rendering. It should be pretty damn hard to determine which OS it is when the userspace is the same. I don't know whether TOR browser currently does this though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

OP uses tor browser to access websites that scan files for viruses

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

That strikes me as an easy thing to miss; I would see the user agent string myself and let the project's maintainers know about it