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Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list

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21–30 of 119 posts

Re: Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list

#21
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy crap I hope that's not true. I've also had unguessable pages indexed, though, and don't have an explanation.

Something worth inspecting further. We know that Chrome stores and sends the browsing history but this is an interesting vector.

I’d be more surprised if they weren’t capturing this information.

Especially if you have autocomplete-while-searching type of features on.

Re: Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list

#22
post #8

I've been working on a site. It's new, domain is only a few weeks old. It's got SSL, so all the bots know it exists. It's never had any sub-pages exposed, just the placeholder lander, no links. Somehow in Google search one of the unguessable pages is indexed. We have used Claude and Gemini to assist with some design aspects. I'm thinking some aggressive data ingestion/indexing is happening by all the bots in the ques…

There's a couple avenues besides just stealing what's in your URL bar.

If you don't use wildcard certs all of your subdomains can be scraped from the certificate transparency logs. Additionally, any domain+cert using HSTS with preload enabled end up in a big list at Google to speed up the initial connection from browser to site.

Re: Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list

#23
post #8

I've been working on a site. It's new, domain is only a few weeks old. It's got SSL, so all the bots know it exists. It's never had any sub-pages exposed, just the placeholder lander, no links. Somehow in Google search one of the unguessable pages is indexed. We have used Claude and Gemini to assist with some design aspects. I'm thinking some aggressive data ingestion/indexing is happening by all the bots in the ques…

[deleted]

Re: Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list

#24
post #22
post #8

I've been working on a site. It's new, domain is only a few weeks old. It's got SSL, so all the bots know it exists. It's never had any sub-pages exposed, just the placeholder lander, no links. Somehow in Google search one of the unguessable pages is indexed. We have used Claude and Gemini to assist with some design aspects. I'm thinking some aggressive data ingestion/indexing is happening by all the bots in the ques…

There's a couple avenues besides just stealing what's in your URL bar. If you don't use wildcard certs all of your subdomains can be scraped from the certificate transparency logs. Additionally, any domain+cert using HSTS with preload enabled end up in a big list at Google to speed up the initial connection from browser to site.

CT logs just explain how they found the domain. T doesn't explain how they could have found unlinked content on the domain itself. If I put up secret-example.com/asdf-1234567.html, how does that page get found if there are no public links to it?

Re: Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list

#25
post #22
post #8

I've been working on a site. It's new, domain is only a few weeks old. It's got SSL, so all the bots know it exists. It's never had any sub-pages exposed, just the placeholder lander, no links. Somehow in Google search one of the unguessable pages is indexed. We have used Claude and Gemini to assist with some design aspects. I'm thinking some aggressive data ingestion/indexing is happening by all the bots in the ques…

There's a couple avenues besides just stealing what's in your URL bar. If you don't use wildcard certs all of your subdomains can be scraped from the certificate transparency logs. Additionally, any domain+cert using HSTS with preload enabled end up in a big list at Google to speed up the initial connection from browser to site.

For hosts, but not pages on the site.

But I think the other explanations take care of pages: cloudflare hints, chrome reporting addresses visited, etc.

Re: Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list

#26
post #8

I've been working on a site. It's new, domain is only a few weeks old. It's got SSL, so all the bots know it exists. It's never had any sub-pages exposed, just the placeholder lander, no links. Somehow in Google search one of the unguessable pages is indexed. We have used Claude and Gemini to assist with some design aspects. I'm thinking some aggressive data ingestion/indexing is happening by all the bots in the ques…

Google Chrome used to report visited pages back to Google, not sure if this still the case. Also, Google Analytics can see visited pages and Google uses it.

Finding domains is easy, everybody uses CTL to find them.

Re: Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list

#27
> The leak occurred when four Fields Medal laureate lecture fields, marked "HIDDEN," were discovered in the front-end code of the ICM 2026 official schedule.

So it was easier than I thought. Bot just scraped public page with hidden fields, not a secret page or to-be-published page from database.

Re: Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list

#28
post #2

Someone used Codex to scrape the ICM website schedule and discovered that the winners list was simply hidden in the front-end code with a "hidden" tag This is on the devs and feels like a very basic leak which could have exploited in the non LLM world as well.

Well, the angle is kind of important here. The company gets their name in the news, they have a reasonable explanation why they were scraping around, and we end up with a story about innovative tech company whiz-kids who made a funny discovery, while it was the webdevs on the other side that goofed up. Imagine a private individual just scraped the website (or simply clicked 'view source') for no reason in particular…

The fact that an egregious case happened once, decades ago, is probably not sufficient grounding to act like every bit of equally trivial “hacking” always results in massively disproportionate law enforcement response.

Sucks it happened. But we all know that is not the typical scenario.

Re: Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list

#29
post #8

I've been working on a site. It's new, domain is only a few weeks old. It's got SSL, so all the bots know it exists. It's never had any sub-pages exposed, just the placeholder lander, no links. Somehow in Google search one of the unguessable pages is indexed. We have used Claude and Gemini to assist with some design aspects. I'm thinking some aggressive data ingestion/indexing is happening by all the bots in the ques…

Google uses data from chrome. If you visited it with chrome, google knows it exists.

Re: Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list

#30
post #3

It's Wang Hong, my god. Cannot they still don't write proper Chinese names?

> Cannot they still don't write

Amusing to see someone complaining about not using their definition of "proper language" when they themselves are not using proper language.

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