You’re using a too-old browser

You’re probably reading this page because you tried to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or Cspace, the wiki thing of which it is a part. Unfortunately you are using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspect, often because it is too old (often this applies to versions of Chrome). Unfortunately, as of early 2025 there has been a flood of high-volume crawlers (ostensibly to gather data for LLM training) that use a variety of outdated browser user agents, especially Chrome user agents. I’ve been experimenting (trying) to block them all out to reduce the load on wandering thoughts, and you’ve joined me.

If it is in error and you are using a current version of your browser of choice, you can contact me at my current location at the University (you should be able to make the email address work from there). If possible, please let me know what browser you are using etc., ideally with its exact user-agent string.

A special note for people who use Vivaldi

Due to the ongoing attack, you may need to change the “User Agent Brand Masking” setting so that your Vivaldi identifies itself as Vivaldi instead of Google Chrome. This also applies to the current edition of Vivaldi.

A special note to people who use the collection.*

You might be viewing it through Archive.today, Archive.ph, Archive.is etc. Unfortunately, Archive.* crawls pages to archive in a way that is impossible to distinguish from malicious actors. They use outdated Chrome user-agent values, crawl from IP address blocks that are widely distributed and not clearly identified as theirs, and some of their IP addresses have false reverse DNS entries claiming they are Googlebot IP addresses (which is something that is generally only done by fairly bad actors). I suggest you use Archive.org, which is a well-behaved archival crawler and can crawl my blog (Wandering Thoughts).