That's correct, it is just plain text and it can easily be spoofed. You should never perform an auth check of any kind with the user agent.
In the above examples, it wouldn't really matter if someone spoofed the header as there generally isn't a benefit to the malicious agent.
Where some sites get into trouble though is if they have an implicit auth check using user agents. An example could be a paywalled recipe site. They want the recipe to be indexed by Google. If I spoof my user agent to be Googlebot, I'll get to view the recipe content they want indexed, bypassing the paywall.
But, an example of a more reasonable use for checking user agent strings for bots might be regional redirects. If a new user comes to my site, maybe I want to redirect to a localized version at a different URL based on their country. However, I probably don't want to do that if the agent is a bot, since the bot might be indexing a given URL from anywhere. If someone spoofed their user agent and they aren't redirected, no big deal.
User agents are useful for checking if the request was made by a (legitimate self-identifying) bot, such as Googlebot.
It could also be used in some specific scenarios where you control the client and want to easily identify your client traffic in request logs.
Or maybe you offer a download on your site and you want to reorder your list to highlight the most likely correct binary for the platform in the user agent.
There are plenty of reasonable uses for user agent that have nothing to do with feature detection.
You know what this reminds me of? Alex Jones repeatedly lying about the Sandy Hook school shooting and having to pay over a billion dollars after his followers repeatedly harassed and threatened those families.
How is this thoroughly debunked lying by Trump and Vance any different?
You know what would be great, would be to hold these weirdos liable for the time and expense that public agencies have incurred to deal with the bomb threats and idiots they've directly incited.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.
Sure, but what does that have to do with this picture? The bridge looks deteriorated on that leading edge because 75 trucks have crashed into it at speed.
What kind of lame equivocation is "second best?" If he's "second best" in a debate with two people, then that means HE LOST.
Are these GOP lawmakers and analysts so spineless and beholden to Trump that they cannot discuss this as just one more - in a long list - of his failures?
I'm not sure how true this perception is in more recent years. Many popular sites, with enormous traffic volumes that could drive digital impression ad revenue, are instead pushing subscriptions or other monetization models.
For instance, the New York Times makes — by far — more money on digital subscriptions than digital advertising. Digital advertising revenues are also declining for them.
Another example is Spotify, where ad revenue from their ad-supported tier did not cover their operational costs and now represents around only a tenth of their revenue compared to subscriptions.
The exceptions to this are generally search and social media sites, where the product for sale on these sites are the users themselves. They're just advertising platforms, which of course make their money from digital advertising.
So I'd say one issue with digital advertising is that it often does not pay the bills for the site owner. Its value is tied to its ability to convert visitors to buyers, but it has to be ramped up to such an extreme level it instead only creates bad experiences.
I go through significant efforts to block digital advertising at multiple levels. Yet, I do not find it difficult to discover new things to buy (from both small and large businesses).
For myself, I suspect most of that is supported through online communities related to my interests and hobbies. Those purchases feel more informed and often more intentional too.
What if we just got rid of digital advertising altogether in the US? How many issues of privacy, health and personal finance would disappear or be greatly reduced?
It's hard for me to imagine what that would look like or the downsides other than to the digital advertising industry itself.
Bash said: "But what I wanna ask you about is what he said last month. He suggested that you ‘happened’ to turn Black recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of your identity.”
Where was the question? That's simply a statement about what Trump said.
Politico's headline is outrageous, but what was Bash even trying to do here? Because it reads like she was trying to ask (without asking) if Harris is black, which is just as weird and absurd as Trump's original comment.
Harris's reply is great because it applies both to Trump's racism and the problem with journalists giving these comments anything more than ridicule.
It has a specification, so a consumer of the API can immediately know what to expect.
It has a content type, so a client sdk can intelligently handle the response.
It supports commonly needed members which are a superset of all of the above JSON examples, including type for code and repeating the http status code in the body if desired.
It is extensible if needed.
It has been defined since at least 2016.
This specification's aim is to define common error formats for applications that need one so that they aren't required to define their own ...
Or wear a respirator while you sand...