Fetchers are sketchy

The way the four fetchers are implemented is sketchy at best.

First of all three out of four (all but the favicon fetcher) try to pass for a Safari browser that they clearly are not — just drop the fake Safari User-Agent, please.

Then there is no indication of which version the request is coming from (since the sources are published different users might be using different instances with different versions, please find a way to indicate a version or a git revision, so that we can tell where the request is coming from).

Further problems are “details” of the HTTP implementation(s) used by the fetchers. A more detailed analysis is present on my blog posting at http://blog.flameeyes.eu/7hdbKe — including the reasoning of why I’m bothered by this.

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NB is OSS, so if you can make some specific recommendations, I’m certain someone could make a patch and pull request:

https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlu…

There’s some notes on my post.

Unfortunately, Python is my achille’s heel or I would have tried fixing it myself :slight_smile:

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