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[ARTICLE · art-16193] src=utcc.utoronto.ca pub= topic=large-language-models verified=true sentiment=· neutral

Using typing in Python leads to different sorts of code

A blog and wiki site operator is blocking high-volume crawlers using old browser user agents, particularly Chrome versions, due to a surge in data collection for LLM training as of early 2025. The blocks are causing feed readers like Inoreader and Feedly to display error pages instead of syndicated content, while archive.today and similar services are also blocked due to their indistinguishable crawling behavior. Users of Vivaldi browser may need to adjust User Agent Brand Masking settings to avoid being misidentified as Chrome.

read2 min publishedMay 28, 2026

You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access

some part of [my blog (Wandering Thoughts)](../space/blog/) or
[CSpace](../space/), the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately

you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions of Chrome). Unfortunately, as of early 2025 there's a plague of high volume crawlers (apparently in part to gather data for LLM training) that use a variety of old browser user agents, especially Chrome user agents. To reduce the load on Wandering Thoughts I'm experimenting with (attempting to) block all of them, and you've run into this.

If this is in error and you're using a current version of your browser of choice, you can contact me at [my current place at the

university](https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~cks/) (you should be able to work out the email address
from that). If possible, please let me know what browser you're
using and so on, ideally with its exact User-Agent string.

I am not blocking Inoreader's feed fetcher or considering it to be too old, and it routinely fetches feeds from me. I don't know why Inoreader is showing you this page. It is possible that they're periodically trying to fetch feeds or pages with an old browser HTTP User-Agent (or an actual old browser) and taking the results of that fetch (this page) as what they should show people instead of the results of their syndication feed fetcher agents. This is a bad mistake today; the results of modern HTTP fetches depend partly on the HTTP User-Agent used.

Much like Inoreader, Feedly is periodically fetching my syndication feeds with a fake, old browser HTTP User-Agent header, which fails, and is then grimly latching on to the results for their actual feed fetching with their regular Feedly HTTP User-Agent. There is nothing I can do about this; you should contact Feedly support, if you can find them. See this comment of mine in Wandering Thoughts for more details.

Due to an 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 applies to even the current version of Vivaldi.

You may be seeing this through archive.today, archive.ph, archive.is, and so on. Unfortunately, archive.* crawls pages to archive in a way that is impossible to distinguish from malicious actors. They use old 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 falsified reverse DNS entries that claim they are googlebot IP addresses (which is something that is normally done only by quite bad actors). I suggest that you use archive.org, which is a better behaved archival crawler and can crawl my blog (Wandering Thoughts).

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