Banking website refuses connection from FreeBSD

Falkon

… For google/youtube my falkon browser is insecure. …

I see the padlock icon (below) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3GJvSYykio/

Please: in what way do you see insecurity?

1624001979764.png


… settings of kde, this is used by things like x11-fm/konqueror or www/falkon. …

As far as I know, those settings are not used by Falkon. Falkon has an integral User Agent Manager:

1624001682384.png
 
Let's say you have one life. You wake up one morning and you have that day working for that company waste your valuable time just to add a "user-agent" sniffer , in order to make a living.
Maddness is the best word i have to describe it.
I'm gone install dconf-editor en gconf-editor against the maddness.
 
Outlook Web App

… Microsoft's Outlook web interface formerly blocked FreeBSD, but does not block it anymore.

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Windows or Edge. I do work in the Exchange/Outlook umbrella, …

The OWA that I use is (at a glance) at Exchange Server 2016 level. Currently overridden by me with:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:89.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/89.0

I expect an eventual shift to the Microsoft-hosted service.

Threats

I've reported some malware and phishing sites to the Domain Registrar with copy to the RIPE abuse and for my surprise they got removed in less than an hour.

Cool. I typically report to Newest IP or URL Threats - Malwarebytes Forums.

In my case those sites was hosted by GoDaddy and they remove them pretty fast.

There's a parallel world where take-down requests are meaningless. I haven't kept abreast of things for the past year or so, but see for example the two bullet points under <https://forums.malwarebytes.com/top...rough-firefox/?do=findComment&comment=1353171>

Side note: I mention use of NoScript; I no longer use it.
 
Opening poster's case



I doubt that there's active screening against FreeBSD. More likely, it wasn't given thought in whatever solutions were chosen by the bank (you can't always blame the bank).

I use Custom UserAgent String.

If you add overrides for sites used by your bank, you might have better luck with strings that are terse, or Windows-specific.

With <https://udger.com/resources/online-parser> returning this, at the time of writing:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:89.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/89.0

– try this override, for example:

Mozilla/5.0 Gecko/20100101 Firefox/89.0



Firefox aside, here are two (old) examples of terse site-specific overrides that worked with Waterfox Classic:
<https://github.com/MrAlex94/Waterfox/issues/978#issue-445841850> was probably the most unusual example of a site that benefited from an override:
  • a Linux-specific string failed
  • a FreeBSD-specific string succeeded.
Thanks Falkon works now. But the following did not worked out for epiphany (web),
Code:
gsettings set org.gnome.Epiphany.web:/org/gnome/epiphany/web/ user-agent "Opera/9.80 (X11; BSD 4.4 x86_64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.16"
For midori i have no user-agent key found.
 
No customer or user should ever have to do that. Any web site that uses that unreliable indicator to determine deliverance is a moron of the highest level. It was a much talked about subject years ago and it was years ago that it was declared that any web site that uses it is a moron of the highest level.
Any fool can use a computer, many do.
 
No customer or user should ever have to do that. … a much talked about subject years ago …

… and I have no doubt that future years of talking will not reduce, to near-zero, the percentage of servers that use user agent strings to determine the suitability of client software.

Not all of these server administrators are morons. Some simply have better things to do with their time than adopt the latest technologies. If it ain't broke for most people, don't fix it, I can empathise.
 
Not all of these server administrators are morons.
It's typically not the server administrators that build web applications. They get told, "here's something company XYZ built for us, you make that run in our environment". They'll have zero say in this, and are often not even involved in setting the requirements (speaking from my own experience).
 
The error message is something to the effect of "use our app or try a supported os"

I suspect the sysadmins could care less. My guess is that the bank wants its customers using platforms (1) that it has tested and (2) where can harvest data. This blanket policy probably affects too few customers to even measure.
 
This blanket policy probably affects too few customers to even measure.
Many, many years ago I had a discussion, I worked for a large banking/insurance company back then, I mentioned that their brand new website didn't work properly with Firefox and they should fix this to support it. Their answer, no it's not a priority, we can see in the logs that 100% of our visitors use Internet Explorer, nobody seems to use Firefox. The website didn't work on Firefox and only worked with IE. How many Firefox users would end up in the logs if the site didn't work for them? It's just another form of survivorship bias.
 
Many, many years ago I had a discussion, I worked for a large banking/insurance company back then, I mentioned that their brand new website didn't work properly with Firefox and they should fix this to support it. Their answer, no it's not a priority, we can see in the logs that 100% of our visitors use Internet Explorer, nobody seems to use Firefox. The website didn't work on Firefox and only worked with IE. How many Firefox users would end up in the logs if the site didn't work for them? It's just another form of survivorship bias.

That's a fair point, but as much as I enjoy FreeBSD, I don't think they're going to discover a few years from now that the majority of their users have switched to FreeBSD and they should have planned better.

Even Linux is probably a statistical blip of their total users, and BSD desktop users are fewer still.
 
I think I even have an old page, about using flash on Linux with Citibank--hrrm, why was I using Citibank, I never had an account there--ahh, credit card at one point. I can't find that page now but I do remember their support writing back, We do not support LINUX (and yes, they did write Linux in all caps). I think it's pretty much what SirDice said, survivorship bias. Even if all Linux/*BSD users united and said, we won't use you anymore, I picture them like the Catherine Tate character, Lauren, going, Am I bovvered?

(For those unfamiliar with the character but who like Dr. Who, there's a great thing they did for some BBC benefit, which is pretty funny--I don't think you need to know the Lauren Cooper character to like it)
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHAJ4VFStUE
 
I mentioned that their brand new website didn't work properly with Firefox and they should fix this to support it. Their answer, no it's not a priority, we can see in the logs that 100% of our visitors use Internet Explorer, nobody seems to use Firefox.
Logic: It's not just for breakfast anymore.

Google will refuse to do anything if I spoof an outdated version of a certain browser. I remember when certain webdesign features were "intended for IE", because it wouldn't render everything like Firefox. Or something along those lines that good markup should take care of.
 
I don't think they're going to discover a few years from now that the majority of their users have switched to FreeBSD and they should have planned better.
That's not the point. Or at least not my point. My point is that no intelligent web programmer uses the user agent string to determine the makeup of a web page. That ANY operating system fails to render a web page is a blunder by an incompetent programmer who thinks he knows computers and stuff.
 
It's quite choppy on my computer too. I find Otter's performance surprisingly poor compared to Firefox and Falkon. I tried switching the backend to QtWebEngine (default is QtWebKit) but then it becomes very buggy and crashes.
 
That's not the point. Or at least not my point. My point is that no intelligent web programmer uses the user agent string to determine the makeup of a web page. That ANY operating system fails to render a web page is a blunder by an incompetent programmer who thinks he knows computers and stuff.
I don't get a sense of incompetence here. Rather it seems like extra work was done to specifically disqualify FreeBSD as an acceptable client. Paranoia maybe, greed maybe, muscle flexing maybe, but probably not incompetence.

Thanks, which strings did you try?

I've decided that's a no go. I'm not going to waste any time fiddling with user agent settings for this bank. Frankly I'd rather close the account. Banks are many. Operating systems few.
 
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