Hacker News · Feb 17, 2026 · Collected from RSS
Article URL: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ViUndoMyViews Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47047443 Points: 25 # Comments: 25
You're using a suspiciously old browser You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace, the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions of Chrome). Unfortunately, as of early 2025 there's a plague of high volume crawlers (apparently in part to gather data for LLM training) that use a variety of old browser user agents, especially Chrome user agents. To reduce the load on Wandering Thoughts I'm experimenting with (attempting to) block all of them, and you've run into this. If this is in error and you're using a current version of your browser of choice, you can contact me at my current place at the university (you should be able to work out the email address from that). If possible, please let me know what browser you're using and so on, ideally with its exact User-Agent string. A special note for people using Vivaldi Due to an ongoing attack, you may need to change the "User Agent Brand Masking" setting so that your Vivaldi identifies itself as Vivaldi, instead of Google Chrome. This applies to even the current version of Vivaldi. A special note for people using archive.* You may be seeing this through archive.today, archive.ph, archive.is, and so on. Unfortunately, archive.* crawls pages to archive in a way that is impossible to distinguish from malicious actors. They use old Chrome User-Agent values, crawl from IP address blocks that are widely distributed and not clearly identified as theirs, and some of their IP addresses have falsified reverse DNS entries that claim they are googlebot IP addresses (which is something that is normally done only by quite bad actors). I suggest that you use archive.org, which is a better behaved archival crawler and can crawl my blog (Wandering Thoughts). Chris Siebenmann, 2025-02-17