[ale] [OT] Ethics of munging USER AGENT without consent

[Christopher Bergeron]

Here's an off-the-wall one for you guys - I was thinking about whipping
up a little peice of code to automatically make every browser from my
company look like Mozilla/5.0 (or Opera, etc. maybe randomly).  Mind
you, I've decided against actually doing it, but the thought did cross
my mind, so I figured I'd post it here for some ethical fodder /
discussion.  

Here' the background:

Basically, I wish more websites were aware of the fact that IE is NOT
the internet.  I've seen far too many sites that just blatantly
disregard browsers that aren't IE, and in an attempt to enlighten the
world, it occurred to me that if I made a tiny change on our gateway
machine, I could make all of the websites that all of the people at my
workplace visit start seeing (at least the ones that check their logs)
that Mozilla and friends are valid browsers, and that they are prolific
(and are becoming much more-so) and should not be ignored.  Aside from
the usual business of avoiding companies/websites that don't welcome my
browser, I figured this might be a neat little trick.  Of course, there
would be a few sites that would just "break" for some users because of
this, but that would be easy enough to handle on a case-by-case basis.
 All in all, I've decided against doing it, but I'm curious as to what
your guys' opinions are on it both from an ethical point of view and
from the techie "how can we take back the internet" point of view also.
 I wouldn't put tactics like this past MSFT and Co. so I'm torn between
a glove's off, no-holds-barred approach versus taking the higher road.

Your thoughts?

Thanks,
CB


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