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Web service user-agent string blocking reminder

I would like to remind Web Service users that on 16 November we’re going to block generic User-Agent strings from accessing our web service. Earlier we said:

The User-Agent string needs to identify the application and the version of the application that is making the request; having a generic User-Agent string like “Java/1.6.0_24″ or “PHP/5.3.4″ does not allow us to properly identify the application making the requests.

IMPORTANT: 6 Months after we release NGS (Nov 16th) we’re going to start blocking common generic User-Agents strings, so please make sure that you send us a proper User-Agent header as part of your request.

You have been warned. :)

This entry was posted by mayhem on Wednesday, October 26th, 2011 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

9 Responses to “Web service user-agent string blocking reminder”

  1. patate12 says:
    October 27, 2011 at 10:07 am

    Are the userjs concerned by this block ? I guess current user agents might be something like Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.9.168 Version/11.52 (depending on the browser).
    Are these allowed ?

  2. mayhem says:
    October 27, 2011 at 11:08 pm

    patate12: No, it should not. The blocking will be for /ws/1 and /ws/2

  3. Nikki says:
    October 27, 2011 at 11:18 pm

    Or to answer the actual question, no, we’re not planning to block browser UA strings.

  4. Paul C. Bryan says:
    October 28, 2011 at 11:14 am

    I’m looking at libwebservice-musicbrainz-perl, (Query.pm:130) which sets the User-Agent header to “WebService::MusicBrainz/0.93″. There are no hooks for applications to modify the User-Agent header in this library. Will this library be at risk?

  5. patate12 says:
    October 28, 2011 at 1:03 pm

    Thanks for the answers ! I’ve been unworried. :)

  6. mayhem says:
    October 30, 2011 at 2:49 pm

    Paul: No we’re not going to block those. First we need to add support for setting user agent strings in all of our client libs. Then we’ll need to allow the generic strings like this one for at least a year before we start blocking those. I’m working on a comprehensive plan for all of this now.

  7. Andrew John Hughes says:
    November 25, 2011 at 6:05 pm

    Does this affect pymusicbrainz? Getting this with a script that uses 0.7.3 now:

    Couldn’t fetch release: HTTP Error 400: Bad Request

  8. Mayhem says:
    November 28, 2011 at 5:47 pm

    Andrew: If that problem persists, its a bug and you should open a ticket for it.

  9. Andrew John Hughes says:
    November 28, 2011 at 6:21 pm

    The solution is to replace:

    q = Query(service)

    with:

    q = Query(ws=service, clientId=”gen_encoding-0.2″)

    i.e. set a clientid.