[PLUG] Web servers, browsers, and OSes

Ben Koenig techkoenig at gmail.com
Tue Jun 9 16:27:52 UTC 2020


On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 7:58 AM Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com>
wrote:

> I would like to understand why a web site could allow me to view certain
> pages but not others. For yesterday's conference speakers tech check I used
> Chrome and was able to log into the conference site, set a password, update
> my speaker's profile, navigate the schedule and agenda pages, including the
> one for the tech check meeting. But, there was no '+' link to join the
> meeting and the two links on the page displayed an empty message page.
>
> The organizer's tech folks suggested it was because I don't use a windows
> OS. This makes no sense to me for two reasons:
>
> 1) Web servers speak with web browsers, not the underlying OS.
>
> 2) I was able to log in and access a number of pages of the conference site
> so why not the active meeting session?
>
> There's no need for a solution as I'll drive to their offices in Lake O and
> present from their conference room using one of their laptops. But
> understanding why site navigation halted at joining a live meeting would be
> really good to know since remote video meetings and conferences seem to be
> part of the new "normal."
>
> Your thoughts?
>
>
Browsers typically provide a "user agent" string to the web server when
making requests. This is a human-readable string that typically identifies
your browser, OS, and any other relevant info as deemed appropriate by the
browser. Most browsers offer the ability to modify your user agent string
("user agent spoofing") to trick websites into giving you the page for a
different browser.

Do some reading on user-agent spoofing, and you'll probably end up finding
the appropriate documentation for your browser of choice.


> Rich
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