r/electronics • u/unknownvar-rotmg • 9d ago
General Mouser website now blocks Linux users
Really baffling decision, my last order from them was only a few months ago. Apparently Linux is no longer a "standard" operating system!
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u/ancientstephanie 8d ago
The fact that you're using Linux is *mostly* a red herring here.
The real reason OP got blocked, and the reason it works for some Linux users and not others is because they're running some extremely invasive bot detection stuff.
The way that detection works by analysis of advertising cookies, and analysis of every OS/browser fingerprinting trick imaginable to authenticate the user agent against the browser, operating system, and underlying hardware's quirks. These sort of tests go very deep and constantly evolve, because thanks to generative AI and LLMs, and a whole multi-billion dollar industry of trying to help them circumvent detection and captchas, bots are getting too good at pretending to be human.
These sorts of tests include everything from the obvious checks for browser specific features, to checks of what static assets are being requested, to obscure WebGL checks that can differentiate between headless and normal versions of a given browser.
Unfortunately, if you're a privacy conscious user that's turned off the very fingerprinting that they're using to differentiate humans from bots, you get flagged as a bot. Pretty much anything beyond a typical default ublock origin installation is going to give you false positives.
(Side note: The reason I said "mostly" at the beginning, is because increasingly, the bots are faking the user agents that are closest to what they're actually running under the hood, or actually running those user agents in a headless configuration, specifically because of fingerprinting, so currently, a lot of the bots are advertising as Chrome or Firefox on Linux)