Faking "Internet Explorer" using other browsers

[Leo J Mauler]

On Sun, 7 Mar 2004 18:28:30 -0600 Jonathan Hutchins
<hutchins at tarcanfel.org> writes:
> On Sunday, March 07, 2004 03:40 am, Leo J Mauler wrote:
> 
> > He says the job application form for www.liveops.com 
> > loads just fine in his MSIE 5.0 browser.  I've tried both 
> > user agent strings in the User Agent Switcher: neither 
> > one loads the job application form for the above site.  
> > Apparently this company uses much more specific 
> > methods to determine your browser than just your user 
> > agent string.
>  
> Does it occur to you that maybe the browser identification 
> has nothing to do with it?  Could it be that the reason they 
> require MSIE is because they use the proprietary Microsoft 
> extensions that are only  found within IE?

Of course, they never get far enough to see if my Mozilla 1.6 browser
would crash using their website, so we'll never know.

Someone else already made the point that they're using Javascript to
determine my browser type, and there's not much I know to do about faking
out Javascript.

> I think you would be unhappy working for them, Leo, they 
> are locked to tightly to Microsoft's vision.

Happiness is relative.  $15 an hour for a work-from-home job which does
not involve cold call sales (inbound sales only) and usually is customer
service (which has not been outsourced to another country) is happiness
regardless of how you spell it.

"Wake up, get out of bed, go downstairs...hey!  I'm at work already!  In
my pyjamas!"

(heaven forbid someone passes a law which, similar to the one requiring
outsourced foreign operators to announce their physical country presence,
requires one to announce their state of dress/undress: "Hi, I'm <Your
Name Here> and I'm speaking to you today in my underwear.")

On the other hand, I'm told by my friend who is working there that WinXP
is required on your home computer to work there.  The only way I'm going
to get a WinXP computer anytime soon (once I've worked out my XP mental
block) is by purchasing a copy from a friendly sidewalk dealer in
Bangladesh for about US$2.  And now that M$ has decided to crack down on
unlicensed dealers expanding M$'s market share through dramatic
reductions in the pricing of Windoze (read: software piracy), M$ is
finally in the ranks of the anti-software piracy folks, working to limit
M$'s market share in markets where M$ is unlikely to expand in any other
way.

Then again, my friend hasn't even tried to log into their entirely
web-based service using Linux yet.  Perhaps they're just forcing IE and
XP because M$ has told them they have to.

And on the other hand, again, I've recently learned from an article
posted here that M$ has made Windows dependent on RPC (Remote Procedure
Call) which allows one machine to execute code on another, and RPC cannot
be disabled on Windows machines.  Perhaps this or any of the other
eighteen questionable Windows networking services is required for their
"solution", so they have to stick with XP and all the security holes that
their "solution" is built on.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/36033.html

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