<OT> How do ISPs work?

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Jul 02, 2008, Tony Alfrey wrote:
> vu pham wrote:
>> Tony Alfrey wrote:
>> [...]
>>> Question:  Is this actually possible, i.e. that an ISP could give  
>>> selective web access to a particular web browser?  Does a web browser 
>>> somehow encode within its packets some identification?
>>
>> Web browsers send many properties in their HTTP requests. One of the  
>> properties is "User-Agent".
>>
>> On my desktop, Firefox set the following value for User-Agent:
>>
>> Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080416  
>> Fedora/2.0.0.14-1.fc8 Firefox/2.0.0.14
>>
>
> Yes, thanks.  Very little difference in the User-Agent for SeaMonkey and  
> Firefox (only the last piece of the string).  Maybe I was just imagining  
> this; I can't imagine what motive they would have for restricting  
> certain User-Agents unless they had someone who was specifically using  
> SeaMonkey to hog their bandwidth.

The motive is probably inept web people using something from
Microsoft to ``design'' their web pages.

I heard an interview with Sun co-founder, Bill Joy, in which he
asked would you have an 800 number that only worked with
Microsoft phones?

> BTW, how did you determine the User-Agent for your browser?  I had to do  
> a Google search and found a piece of javascript that does this.

I am not familiar with SeaMonkey, but many non-IE browsers have
the ability to present different User-Agents.  Some allow you to
specify different User-Agents to different sites.

Bill
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