this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
90 points (88.8% liked)

Technology

86879 readers
4100 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
90
Linux just cracked 10% desktop usage in North America, but no one's sure why (www.techspot.com)
submitted 3 hours ago by sanitation@lemmy.today to c/technology@lemmy.world
28 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] nyan@lemmy.cafe 6 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Crawlers—even the honest ones—have been spoofing browser User-Agent strings (partially or completely) since the beginning of the commercial Internet. Why would they do this? To dodge bad browser-sniffing scripts, which I still run into from time to time.

[–] chrash0@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

sure, but is that implying that 5% of this traffic is bad faith or rogue agents? the tools built into Claude Code and Codex surely have their own user-agent settings.

and why would they spoof Linux instead of Windows?

[–] nyan@lemmy.cafe 1 points 19 minutes ago

sure, but is that implying that 5% of this traffic is bad faith or rogue agents?

Given the volume of requests that have been semi-DDOS'ing a lot of servers? 5% is probably an underestimate.

the tools built into Claude Code and Codex surely have their own user-agent settings.

"Surely" is like "assume"—it says more about the speaker than the entity being discussed. They almost certainly don't use completely distinct strings (no one does—they all start with "Mozilla/5.0"); at most they might have tacked an additional bit on at the tail. And that's if they're being aboveboard.

and why would they spoof Linux instead of Windows?

Why not? But actually, this may be due to an incorrect assumption on the part of the stats collectors. Typical strings for bots that admit to being bots don't specify an OS: "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot" as opposed to, say "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/134.0.0.0" or "Mozilla/5.0 (Android 15; Mobile; SM-G556B/DS; rv:130.0) Gecko/130.0 Firefox/130.0". If they're dumping anything without OS markers into the "Linux" bucket, that might do it.