You can be clueless...

... but do you have to make it so obvious? For several weeks now, users of Deutsche Bahn’s timetable service have been receiving error message 751 with the text: “We’re sorry, an error has occurred during this process. Your browser’s behavior resembles that of a bot,” when they access these pages using a browser that identifies itself as a Linux system.

No problem for a real bot, since it would simply change the value under “general.useragent.override” in the Firefox browser settings (website: about:config), for example, in "Windows". The same applies to any real person — you just have to know how. This is more of a problem for those who don’t know this and try to get the necessary schedule information from dubious websites on the internet.

This is particularly unsettling for those who have taken the plunge and switched from Windows, Android, or iOS to a free, open-source system. To put Europe’s much-vaunted “digital sovereignty” into practice, it would certainly be a good idea if Deutsche Bahn tried the opposite next month: identifying any browser that identifies itself as a Windows system as an insecure data leech and denying it access to timetable information.

Alternatively, Deutsche Bahn could also think twice about such (in)security measures in the future...

Read more https://www.heise.de/news/Deutsche-Bahn-Keine-Auskunft-unter-Linux-11300742.html

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