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A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

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Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#281

Post by nemothekid »

brudgers wrote: post #251
nemothekid wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the information on the website I would argue is a dark pattern. The remote server knows my IP address? Yes that's how the web works. The server knows my window's resolution? Well I think thats very useful information for the application to have for layouting. You know what other application is recording my keystrokes right now? HackerNews. "recording keystrokes" is also known as "typing in a text box"

HN does not record your key strokes until and unless you click the reply link…and then only if recording your final edited comment counts as recording your keystrokes. On the other hand, your browser might be recording each of your keystrokes just because it can and if your browser does, those keystrokes are not going to HN.

It's trivial for HN to record your keystrokes. Any application that can read your keys can record your keystrokes - its fundamental to how software works. You wouldn't be able to write a game if you couldn't.

The distinction you are trying to make a is a distinction without a difference. If you don't want sites to "record your keystrokes", then don't use a computer. Trying to paint this as nefarious is a losing battle and completely undermines any awareness you are trying to bring about.

Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#282

Post by Sophira »

thesuitonym wrote: post #72
joshstrange wrote: post #37

It's somewhat interesting but over half of what it talked about is just silly. - Reverse IP/geocode (while be cute about "we won't show your IP", oh no, not my IP!) - Timezone - Ok, yeah, lots of websites need/make use of that for completely legit tasks - Browser/OS/Screen size - boring, again mostly needed or historical - GPU - Again, not super interesting IMHO - Battery - Ok, this is the first one I think should be…

I'm with you on almost all of this, but since you (almost) asked, here's how I think fonts should work: The server tells your browser to display a line of text in a specific font. If that font is available, your browser does so, and if not, it displays the text in your default font, or a backup font if the developer specified one. There's no need for the server to know if it's there or not.

That's essentially how things used to work, and the problem is that it too can be gamed using JavaScript. For example, a relatively naive approach might be:

1. Make an HTML element that contains "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" written in the default font.

2. You can't query what font that was, but you can use the getComputedStyle() DOM function of that element to work out the width (for example) of the resulting element. Note this down.

3. Do the same for all the different fonts that you want to test.

4. If any element's width differs from the default's noted in step 2, then the corresponding font is guaranteed to be installed on your system.

As written, this won't detect the font that the user has selected to be the default font (because it won't detect the width as being different). However, you can work around this (and remove most false negatives to boot) by a simple addition:

5. Pick one of the fonts that you detected as being installed.

6. Create more elements (as in step 1) that correspond to all the fonts that were detected as being the same width as the default, but have the font you selected in step 5 as a fallback. (eg. 'font-family: Testing, Fallback;')

7. Any element with a width that differs from the font you selected in step 5 is installed on the system.

What you get will be a relatively complete list of what fonts are on the system out of the ones you tested. If you want more accuracy, you can do a similar thing with individual letters instead.

Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#283

Post by nemothekid »

fragmede wrote: post #271
nemothekid wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the information on the website I would argue is a dark pattern. The remote server knows my IP address? Yes that's how the web works. The server knows my window's resolution? Well I think thats very useful information for the application to have for layouting. You know what other application is recording my keystrokes right now? HackerNews. "recording keystrokes" is also known as "typing in a text box"

There's a difference between HN getting the final text when you hit "reply" and a site using JavaScript to time how long it takes you to hit each individual key press and how many times you hit backspace or moved your mouse to switch to a different tab to look something up or if you made up some facts in the comment or if you used an extension like grammarly or anything else.

>site using JavaScript to time how long it takes you to hit each individual key press and how many times you hit backspace

You mean like a video game? Are video games now nefarious applications tracking you? Your browser is not "leaking" anything to websites. It's hard to understand what you are even complaining about. If you don't want grammarly to record your keystrokes, then don't install grammarly.

It's like ordering a beer and then complaining about alcohol.

Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#284

Post by dylan604 »

efreak wrote: post #273
dylan604 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an experiment, I made a small retail shop ( nice things for UX. It's just that we can't have nice things because people suck

That's what frames are for. Only reload the frame with the important data in it (total cost, list of products in cart) and point the category links in the page to open in the same frame as the shopping cart. You can even style the frame contents with the main page's stylesheet so it only needs to load a `$41.29` total if that's all that's changed.

No, I did not defile myself that badly by using frames nor layout with tables either. I did layout with CSS. It wasn't just an update to the total. It was a proper modern day UI look (if not so much feel) so that it had a collapsible shopping cart on the side so you could see the items and quantities and link back to the item's page.

Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#285

Post by sitzkrieg »

efilife wrote: post #239
sitzkrieg wrote: post #183

dark gray on black text was a terrible choice, virtually unreadable contrast

It's Claude that chose this and it doesn't really have eyes, so that's the reason

what a terrible reason lol. i should mention i use light mode and it got that wrong to boot

Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#286

Post by byhemechi »

LPisGood wrote: post #280
byhemechi wrote: post #279

Unreadable and useless vibe coded shit. Submissions like this are why I've all but stopped using HN

I didn’t find it unreadable. It was pretty neat in my opinion.

45% grey text on a 10% grey background set in a light serif font.

Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#287

Post by bdelmas »

shimman wrote: post #190
jwally wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its ease is also vastly inflated. If it was as simple as this site makes it out to be, companies like fingerprint.com don't exist.

Don't know about easy but their JS lib doing this is quite good: https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprintjs Honestly surprised to see it licensed as MIT now too. It was something less permissive before. They aren't doing anything too crazy, more like being the first ones to be open about it. I couldn't imagine what else companies like Google or Meta or TikTok can extract out of it that no one else can't. Integrat…

I knew about this library but is it legal in the EU? Because that library works very well

Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#288

Post by therealdrag0 »

ifh-hn wrote: post #100
karmakaze wrote: post #82

Whether or not the information is accurate isn't really the point. It's that it serves as a way to identify you even without cookies. I looked for better websites, the EFF one[0] is informative. My browser fingerprint was unique among the visitors in the past 45 days. [0] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

> Our tests indicate that you have strong protection against Web tracking. Gotta love Firefox with ublock origin in advanced mode, even without JavaScript disabled so the site worked.

I got the same in my iPhone using Safari with Firefox Focus installed.

Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#289

Post by sgbeal »

yard2010 wrote: post #253
sgbeal wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely you can infer when you work and sleep from your experience living your life as you. Not everybody has a schedule. Mine is essentially "eat when hungry, sleep when tired", and my sleep patterns more closely follow a 26-hour day than a 24-hour day.

This is fascinating, please do tell more about it! How does it affect your mental health? How do you deal with times day and night are flipped? How does it affect your social life?

> How does it affect your mental health?

That it should in some way affect my mental health has never once occurred to me. If anything, i assume that living on one's body's own natural schedule would be optimal in terms of related effects on mental health.

> How do you deal with times day and night are flipped?

When there's not something pressing me into a schedule, e.g. a job, i kind of "circle around" to a conventional schedule every few weeks. All things considered, i prefer the "swapped" times because it's quieter at night. e.g. less traffic driving by, fewer neighbors making various noises, and no DHL/UPS/DPD deliveries for the neighbors being dropped off here because the neighbors aren't home (whereas i am almost always at home and both the neighbors and the local delivery folks know it).

i'm a retiree so, with the exception of shopping and rare appointments, the night/day or weekend/weekend[^1] are not generally distinctions which affect me, and it's never bothered me in the slightest to not have a fixed schedule. On the contrary, a fixed schedule somewhat bums me out long-term, presumably because it does not match my biological clock.

> How does it affect your social life?

My social life is (by preference and choice) comprised solely of (A) my FOSS work, and there's no clock associated with any of that, and (B) my wife. Both my and my wife's biological families are all on another continent, so we've no family obligations which require physical presence. When i'm not FOSS'ing, we play a lot of board games.

[^1]: stores are closed on Sundays and all public holidays in Germany. More than once i've gone to the store, only to discover it's closed due to a holiday i've overlooked (like, most recently, May 1st).

Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#290

Post by IdiotSavage »

IdiotSavage wrote: post #47

> Where you were before > news.ycombinator.com This has always bothered me the most. I disabled the 'Referer' header once, but it breaks many websites.

I just found a new(?) setting in Firefox, to spoof the Referer header, instead of omitting it. Will try that for a while and see how it works.

  about:config -> network.http.referer.spoofSource
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