Live data from Hacker News

Who am I: A mind reader (don't forget to view source)

tinsnail.neocities.org

41–50 of 181 posts

Re: Who am I: A mind reader (don't forget to view source)

#42
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presumed as much. But if you can covertly jimmy the UI and parse the user's interaction, you can more or less get at the history like that anyway. I don't see any secure way to handle this besides disallowing :visited styling entirely.

I'm having a hard time following here. What is "covertly jimmying a UI" and how would it allow you to exploit visited styles?

For a less "covert" example than I am sure the OP was thinking, you could have "click the red button to continue" sort of like this page does. :)

Re: Who am I: A mind reader (don't forget to view source)

#45
post #20

It was eerily accurate on me. 1. science 2. technology 3. programming

They could do the same game, but hard-code the results, and be right for 95% of the audience here :)

I actually was going to come to the comments, assuming they had done that before remembering that I was supposed to view the source.

Re: Who am I: A mind reader (don't forget to view source)

#46

I thought the a:visited exploit was addressed.

The browser wont let the page get at the data, that is what was fixed, but you can still show visited differently to the user, and if you make only the visited visible and get the user to interact that information is revealed.

Re: Who am I: A mind reader (don't forget to view source)

#47
post #20

It was eerily accurate on me. 1. science 2. technology 3. programming

They could do the same game, but hard-code the results, and be right for 95% of the audience here :)

Hmm, I was: 1. technology 2. programming 3. history 4. politics 5. design 6. architecture

And it was dead-right.

Re: Who am I: A mind reader (don't forget to view source)

#48
post #39

Couldn't one simply make a display:none on normal links and display:block on :visited, then stack them all on top each other with position:absolute and catch mouse events from each element via JS?

Browsers have a very limited set of properties that they allow in :visited rules, and display isn't one of them.

Re: Who am I: A mind reader (don't forget to view source)

#49
post #17

Obvious question - how was the list of URLs compiled? Some are really specific like YouTube channels. On the other hand there are only 15 categories and there are probably a lot of people that would not get a single match or only something very generic like Wikipedia.

The coolest way would be cold, hard natural selection from Alexa top sites, possibly with weighting placed to relevant sites at the introduction of the dataset. Perhaps I will fork.
Post reply on HN