Do you use GMAIL? Do you use GMAIL in your browser? Have you ever opened an email with an image? Guess what? Those images are loaded via a proxy by Google, and guess what it's user-agent is?
Is this forged or real?

Chiroyce wrote:

Is this forged or real?

Forged probably

What exactly is “forged” supposed to mean in this context? A user agent is simply a string of text that you may send along with requests, and that string is your user agent. It is what it is. What else?

Naleksuh wrote:

A user agent is simply a string of text that you may send along with requests, and that string is your user agent. It is what it is. What else?

Does that mean that the proxy isn't using Windows NT 5.1 (latest version is 10) and/or Firefox 11 (latest version is 92.0.1)?

Of course not, it's probably not “using” any browser unless it's a screenscraper. The proxy is likely simply querying from whatever codebase Gmail is using to proxy images

Also, it's probably not running Windows either as most servers use Linux. I'd guess that string is there incase web servers are trying to parse the user agent and need it to contain an OS and browser. Even if it's not really there.

Naleksuh wrote:

Of course not, it's probably not “using” any browser unless it's a screenscraper. The proxy is likely simply querying from whatever codebase Gmail is using to proxy images

Since it has a browser in it's User Agent, can we assume that it's a screenscraper?

“Since it has a browser in it's User Agent, can we assume that it's a screenscraper?”

Probably not, screenscrapers are mostly used for pretending to be human, which there is no need to do here. It would also not be useful for downloading images. I already said above why I believe the browser info is there

̦— https://www.scientiamobile.com/what-is-google-image-proxy/

So it may seem like this is most likely forged …

Its faked to prevent email tracker services from collecting your IP and user agent.

Gmail is not an acronym.
(Also Windows NT 5.1 is Windows XP so…)

CST1229 wrote:

Gmail is not an acronym.

So it shouldn't be in caps?

CST1229 wrote:

(Also Windows NT 5.1 is Windows XP so…)

Ahhh … the OG Windows OS!

Chiroyce wrote:

CST1229 wrote:

Gmail is not an acronym.

So it shouldn't be in caps?

That's how English works.

Occasionally user agents contain fake version numbers or for privacy or compatibility reasons (presumably a few websites or analytics die when they encounter an oddly formatted user agent string).

For example, Chrome's user agent always has “Mozilla,” “KHTML,” “Gecko,” “AppleWebKit,” and “Safari” probably for websites that were made for dominant browsers before Chrome's time. Namely, the latter two probably targets websites that were specifically designed for iOS Safari before other mobile browsers became a thing. And I think Chrome is thinking about including less information in its user agent in the future (so it'll say Chrome 103.0.0.0 and Windows 10 even if the user is using Chrome 103.1.2.3 on Windows 11)

u7p wrote:

Chiroyce wrote:

CST1229 wrote:

Gmail is not an acronym.

So it shouldn't be in caps?

That's how English works.

Well, it's not necessarily English's rules that matter in this case since “Gmail” is a trademark, and occasionally trademark style prevails. For example, MATLAB isn't an initialism but rather comes from “matrix laboratory,” but it's stylized in all caps and thus is typically written in all caps.

CST1229 wrote:

(Also Windows NT 5.1 is Windows XP so…)

Windows Server 2003?

kccuber wrote:

CST1229 wrote:

(Also Windows NT 5.1 is Windows XP so…)

Windows Server 2003?

Server 2003 (and XP Pro x64) uses NT 5.2

OK — I think I understood why, it's to trick image servers into thinking that they're serving the image to an actual human and not a proxy, so probably it's outdated since the proxy may have been made long ago and no Googler cared to update the UA string.

Lol that UA was from so long ago

• nobody used macos or linux
  
• Internet Exploder had 31.68% of the browser market share, Chrome only had 28.1%, and Firefox still had 22.75%
  

dhuls wrote:

Lol that UA was from so long ago

• nobody used macos or linux
  
• Internet Exploder had 31.68% of the browser market share, Chrome only had 28.1%, and Firefox still had 22.75%
  

5.1 is just xp.

ok closing as resolved