Make the network think your Mac isn’t a Mac

1. Get Firefox.

2. Open Firefox:

3. In the address bar, type in about:config

4. In the search box, type useragent

5. Right click in the white space, and select “New” -> “String”

6. Paste this into the box: general.useragent.override and click ‘OK’

7. Paste this into the box: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Gentoo; Linux x86_64; rv:32.0) Gecko/20150207 Firefox/32.0 and click ‘OK’

It should look something like this:

8. Turn off Firefox auto-update

• When Firefox updates itself, it removes the general.useragent.override string, which will change the useragent back to the default agent for a Mac. We don’t want that.

• Go to ‘Firefox’ -> ‘Preferences’ in the menu bar

• Click ‘Advanced’, then ‘Update’, and select the option that says “Never check for updates”

  • Disregard the security risk message, we won’t be using Firefox as the main browser anyway.

9. Set the homepage to Google

• Click ‘General’ in the Preferences window

• For ‘Home Page:’ type in www.google.com

  • This is so that Firefox will automatically try to load a webpage when you open it. Makes it a bit more convenient.

We’re done.

Anytime you see that stupid “SafeConnect” message, just open Firefox and refresh it a few times. Once Firefox can load the Google search page, you can close it and open your usual web browser.

Avast and Sophos can now go screw themselves.

Last modified on 2016-09-12