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Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS

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Re: Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS

#121

Post by 14113 »

esrauch wrote: post #113
nradov wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HTTP User-Agent header was a mistake from the beginning. There is no legitimate need for the server to know what software the client is (or claims to be) running.

I feel like this is with 2026 view where browsers are so mutually compatible. In the bad old days there were so many differences between html, css and js behaviors that if you wanted your site to be nice you had to change it for the browser. The way css padding worked wasn't even the same. Feature detection was rarely viable for any of this. No user agent would probably have only entrenched IE6 dominance even more by…

> I feel like this is with 2026 view where browsers are so mutually compatible.

I wish this was the case. Unfortunately, companies that work on non-Chromium browsers need to employ dedicated web compatibility teams to either a) help website users fix non-standard (i.e. Chrome only) HTML/CSS/JS, or b) replicate Chromium-like behaviour for specific (very popular) websites so that they work "correctly".

There's also the websites that deliberately block certain browsers which is what tools like "chrome-mask"[1] are built to solve.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/

Re: Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS

#122

Post by coppsilgold »

chjj wrote: post #119
coppsilgold wrote: post #40

Even Tor Browser (/mullvad-browser) gave up trying to obscure the operating system though arguably they shouldn't have. There appear to be too many fingerprinting vectors.

I think they made the right call on that. It's unclear to me whether hiding the OS is even possible. There's just too much OS-specific behavior that happens inside (and outside) a web browser. It's hard to account for all of it. OS rendering differences can likely betray you even when canvas extraction is blocked/noised. At least one tor-browser dev has publicly confirmed that you can't even hide the difference betwe…

It's not surprising that JS would out you, what I am wondering if whether or not volunteering OS information is foolish when it may not be possible to determine without JS.

Why give up information when you don't have to? Some people disable JS at least some of the time.

Re: Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS

#123

Post by ddtaylor »

vlian2088 wrote: post #99
ddtaylor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

In this case someone could argue you are very verbose, needlessly breaking things into lists, and comparing or contrasting things that don't have much impact or relation.

None of this is new to AI. Top ten lists, spam, etc. have existed for a long time. If you want to disagree with someone on the Internet, you do have to actually articulate what your gripes are to some extent beyond just hand waving near LLMs, etc.

Re: Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS

#124

Post by dannyw »

isiahl wrote: post #56
Retr0id wrote: post #5

Thanks for the writeup, claude

What I think is crazy are the links at the top to summarize the article with your preferred AI provider. The prompt asks it to summarize the article along with an advertisement for their product. This is the prompt I got when clicking the Claude link: > summarize+this+article+and+explain+how+scrapfly+helps+me+scrape+any+website+at+scale+and+bypass+anti-bot+systems+for+my+use+case:+ https://scrapfly.dev/posts/browser-…

They are quite ‘innovative’, I’ll give them that.

It’s time to sign up with a virtual card, point it at my website, and see how to block them ;)

Re: Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS

#125

Post by AlotOfReading »

Asraelite wrote: post #89
AlotOfReading wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend pretty much everyone avoid fixed point and other float alternatives, barring exceptional cases after you've done your own numerical analysis, or you lack floating point hardware (rare these days). Yes, fixed point can use simpler hardware. That's also a completely irrelevant consideration for software. The vast majority of processors are optimized for floats now and some operations (e.g. division) are act…

> The vast majority of processors are optimized for floats now and some operations (e.g. division) are actually faster. This seems backwards. Hardware is optimized for floats because people use floats. If people used fixed point, hardware would become optimized for that instead. Given an equal number of transistors, I'm pretty sure fixed point would be a lot faster on equally optimized hardware for almost all operati…

I'm sure it would, but my argument is centered around the world we actually live in right now.

Re: Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS

#126

Post by ddtaylor »

Retr0id wrote: post #110
ddtaylor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds needlessly divisive. Why not criticize the content instead of the source or medium?

The medium is the message, which is especially true when it exists as content-marketing for their anti-anti-scraping product for AI companies to use to improve their ability to emulate blogs, among other things.

Those are closer to real objective analysis. Much better than hand waving near LLMs and dismissing the content without articulating why. My guess is that a comment that directly says that doesn't get as much traction and depending on how straight-faced it was could be violating the guidelines on accusing someone of manipulating HN, etc.

Re: Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS

#127

Post by ddtaylor »

queenkjuul wrote: post #92
fragmede wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all want signal and no noise, but complaining about whether or not it's noise is just more noise.

It's a signal to those who haven't read it yet that it isn't worth reading

My 8 year old nefew can come into random HN threads and post "this is trash yo" and that would also be the same signal I suppose.

Re: Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS

#128

Post by Retr0id »

ddtaylor wrote: post #126
Retr0id wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The medium is the message, which is especially true when it exists as content-marketing for their anti-anti-scraping product for AI companies to use to improve their ability to emulate blogs, among other things.

Those are closer to real objective analysis. Much better than hand waving near LLMs and dismissing the content without articulating why. My guess is that a comment that directly says that doesn't get as much traction and depending on how straight-faced it was could be violating the guidelines on accusing someone of manipulating HN, etc.

I'm happy with how much I said in my original comment, too. It's mostly subtext.

Re: Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS

#130

Post by cozzyd »

chjj wrote: post #35
qurren wrote: post #22

just inject this with your favorite JS injection plugin let oldTanh = Math.tanh; Math.tanh = x => oldTanh(x) + Math.random()/10000000;

it's elegant, but i prefer: Math.tanh = Math.random;

since tanh is probably being used as a sigmoid, it's probably better to replace with just randomly changing the sign.
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