Before starting my record attempt between Kemijärvi, Finland and Lagos, Portugal, people told me over and over it would break down in Germany. So much so that I even tried to re-but (pre-but?) some of the likely critique.
Now, having made the trip, and none of the total
Definitely not. Just last week it took me over an hour to book a train on bahn.de. I needed multiple tries as I was constantly being flagged as bot - even though I was logged in and I had windows as browser user agent. Linux is being blocked by default. The payment options are Paypal, Card payment with Mastercard or Visa and Open banking by Tink (Visa). No European payment options.
The only reason to book with bahn.de is because they have cheap tickets. The website is garbage.
Wonderful day!
I am sorry, but I just cannot believe the website blocks requests if the browser/client headers as
sec-ch-ua-platformoruser-agentcontain “linux” or not contain “windows”…More to that, I’ve just easily surfed the website via Firefox and Google Chrome browser on a Linux distribution.
May I ask, how did you actually confirm it’s OS related?
Journalists researched it:
German: https://www.heise.de/news/Deutsche-Bahn-Keine-Auskunft-unter-Linux-11300742.html
English: https://itsfoss.com/news/deutsche-bahn-blocking-linux-users/
I tried their route planner a week ago and had the same problem.
Roger that. Thank you for the references!
It indeed seems to be header related.
In such case, it must be a bug/mistake, where an incorrect security configuration might have used a dictionary with a list of known suspicious User-Agent values, like the following:
- https://github.com/BryanMorgan/isbot/blob/main/fixtures/bots.txt
Let’s hope this case was not caused by something vibe-coded (LLM/“AI” generated)… or else, that would damage the trust I have to them much permanently…
I wish you safe, successful, and peaceful roads!
That was an actual issue somewhat recently. It’s solved for now since even DB knew that blocking Linux users like that was not intended behaviour.
My linux still gets blocked if the query is not for a travel on the same day, but in future
Quite agree! Best website is ns.nl or nsinternational.nl even worth it for trains not passing through the Netherlands.