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

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

#101

Post by amjd »

analog31 wrote: post #92
Conlectus wrote: post #58

Original creator here. I'm super surprised to see this posted here. I can answer any questions people have.

For those of us who don't know Javascript, I'll just ask in broad terms: What is it, how's it work, what's it do?

It's a neat little hack to predict your interests among various categories.

The hundreds of grey boxes that you see are actually links to sites belonging to different categories like programming, science etc. and the red ones are those that you have visited (based on your browser history). The basic idea here is of using the CSS selector a:visited to highlight visited links in red, and by clicking the red boxes the users themselves reveal the sites they have visited. The website then uses this information to draw a pretty pie chart showing which categories the user is interested in.

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

#102

Post by jradd »

mdup wrote: post #90
keerthiko wrote: post #75

I could probably post a similar gizmo on HN with a results static page that says Your interests are: (some subset of) Programming Science Technology Games With literally no scripting, and everyone would find it "reasonably accurate" :D

At first, I thought the OP had done exactly that!

Same thing here. I happen to be very interested in neuroscience as well, so when I read “don't forget to view source,” I assumed it would feature a bibliographic citation or something. doh…

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

#103

Post by lugg »

mdup wrote: post #90
keerthiko wrote: post #75

I could probably post a similar gizmo on HN with a results static page that says Your interests are: (some subset of) Programming Science Technology Games With literally no scripting, and everyone would find it "reasonably accurate" :D

At first, I thought the OP had done exactly that!

Also successfully trolled. And I also thought something similar after trying to trick it a couple of times. Wasn't until I read the comments it all made sense - i was using work chrome profile none of my actual interests showed up just my professional ones.

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

#104

Post by lugg »

amjd wrote: post #94
mataug wrote: post #36

This is quite clever. By the way now I've got a nice list of blogs/websites that I should probably read for various topics.

That's what I was thinking too. Here's a prettified list of the sites used: https://gist.github.com/amjd/acc5e108bfb2f29f050c

Thanks so much. Been looking for an up to date blog roll like this for a while.

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

#105

Post by fzaninotto »

zongitsrinzler wrote: post #96

This can be done without any user interaction (and most likely has done to you without you knowing it). Check this link for 101: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1584850/is-it-possible-t...

Here is a white paper of another exploit without user interaction, which is still working on most browsers. It's called "Pixel-perfect timing attack".

https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/US-13-Stone-Pixel-Perfect-T...

The related bug on the Chrome tracker was closed with a "won't fix".

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

#106

Post by andybak »

megablast wrote: post #80
lrichardson wrote: post #64

Question: I know that the `:visited` exploit is handled by the browsers so that you can't figure out by javascript what is going on... but what if you used just CSS to figure it out? For instance, what if you generated the CSS which had a unique image it requested via the `background-image` property, stored the data on the server, then just requested the data from the server after the fact? Do the browsers prohibit t…

Could your draw the screen, then save that as a screenshot, and analyse the image?

Just what I was thinking. Can't you render the DOM to a canvas and then access the pixels in that?

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

#107

Post by PurplePanda »

krrishd wrote: post #24

If you open the console and run this script, it'll click every single square, giving a list of the most common types of sites in the array being used: for(i=0;i

I had to change it to start at i=1 to avoid clicking on the link to github and leaving the page

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

#108

Post by wobbleblob »

staccatomeasure wrote: post #93
keerthiko wrote: post #75

I could probably post a similar gizmo on HN with a results static page that says Your interests are: (some subset of) Programming Science Technology Games With literally no scripting, and everyone would find it "reasonably accurate" :D

fwiw, my results were very wrong

It uses a list of sites, the ones that are in your browser history are red squares. The results may be wrong for you if you cleared your browser history, or if you share your browser with someone else, or if you habitually visit sites you don't like.
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