Use Tor Browser's User Agent

[mehlon]

In order to protect user privacy and resist browser fingerprinting, the Tor Browser uses a single user agent string for all users regardless of platform or version. I think it makes sense to use whatever user agent the Tor Browser uses in NewPipe as well, since it lets users blend in more, especially if they use Orbot to connect (#1129).

[gkeegan]

Would this cause any more captchas?

[mehlon]

I don't get any reCAPTCHA prompts when accessing YouTube from the Tor Browser.
So I think not. Especially since Tor Browser has a very generic user agent that tends to line up with the latest Firefox ESR on Windows 10:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

[Poolitzer]

But with your request to change the user agent won't really help. People can't use Tors user agent unless they already use Orbot as that wouldnt really make any sense.

Uhm yes they can? You can actually set your own user agent in a lot of browsers. And what @mehlon suggested makes sense. It would blend in with the TOR users and be less traceable if the current agent is smth more specific to an/this android application. Its a nice feature privacy wise

Would this cause any more captchas?

@gkeegan they will be mostly based on IPs and cookies and how you access the web. I dont think they will discriminate (much) based on agents, because they are so simple to change. But its a black box, we dont know.

[Poolitzer]

Yes, I am vastly uneducated, first one to admit it.

I think OPs idea was to use the same agent as tor, because it is a) an agent which doesnt give away much and b) would be more wildly used so you cant identify NewPipe users based on it. As I have learned from NewPipeExctractor#258 though we apparently need to send a specific one to request json we can work with anyway, sooo....

[ghost]

I am an expert on this topic, and I propose this user-agent string: "W3C standards are important. Stop fucking obsessing over user-agent already."
See this article from almost 20 years ago: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Web/user-agent-string.html

What in the world would that provide any type of anonymity?!?!?!?!?!?!? Explain pls.

Nobody is talking about anonymity.

But with your request to change the user agent won't really help. People can't use Tors user agent unless they already use Orbot as that wouldnt really make any sense. It would just be stupid.

So everyone using Firefox 68 on WinNT 10 is just stupid.

[wb9688]

@Poolitzer: We don't need a specific one, we need one that's recent enough, so that YouTube will serve their new site. Or in versions earlier than v0.18.5, we need one that's old enough for them to serve their old site.

Also, as of v0.18.5, we're using the UA of Firefox 68 on Windows 10. We're doing that as Windows 10 is the most common OS and Firefox 68 is a ESR release, so we don't need to change our UA as often. Coincidentally, that's the same thing Tor Browser thought. We might add an option to change the UA if we decide to add miscellaneous settings, see the discussion about that in #2998.

[KonoromiHimaries]

cdn is like a better chose #1435 (comment) of course, it can be used together with tor

[litetex]

In order to protect user privacy and resist browser fingerprinting, the Tor Browser uses a single user agent string for all users regardless of platform or version.

This is already done in

NewPipe/app/src/main/java/org/schabi/newpipe/DownloaderImpl.java

Lines 45 to 46 in 793b88a

	public static final String USER_AGENT
	= "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0";

This issues is very likely outdated.
Closing it for now.