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A demonstration of browser events used to monitor online behaviour

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Re: A demonstration of browser events used to monitor online behaviour

#141

Post by xkcd-sucks »

truth_sentinell wrote: post #110
tyfon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am dealing with it by not visiting homepages that rely on JavaScript. The point is I do not want a bunch of insecure code running on my computer just to read some text, which is what I usually do in a browser.

Maybe all you visit is blogs. But there are lots of websites that rely on JS in order to express their intentions. It's like watching a movie with the mute on because the english accents bothers you -and without the possibility of subtitles-.

It seems that for most sites that rely on JS, about ten percent is actually necessary and the remainder is useless advertising/tracking/analytics/fonts/social media buttons. NoScript, uMatrix etc. are really helpful here.

Re: A demonstration of browser events used to monitor online behaviour

#142

Post by udkl »

ogig wrote: post #6

This reminded me that notch web game[1]. Both kept me interested and I find them a very pleasant form of art. [1] http://game.notch.net/drowning/

Great game. This is on the similar lines like the SIMS and both of them are different implementations of the 'life simulator' approach.

Re: A demonstration of browser events used to monitor online behaviour

#143

Post by Ph0X »

pawadu wrote: post #23
ogig wrote: post #6

This reminded me that notch web game[1]. Both kept me interested and I find them a very pleasant form of art. [1] http://game.notch.net/drowning/

Surprised no one has mentioned Cookie Clicker yet, which I think was what inspired notch to write that game: http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/ Notch's game was written in Dart and the source code is simple and elegant: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid...

Candy box [1] was actually the original IIRC, or at least the one that came before the drowning and cookie clicker and was the inspiration for them. Also check out Candy Box 2 [2] which is honestly a full game.

[1] http://candies.aniwey.net/

[2] http://candybox2.net/

Re: A demonstration of browser events used to monitor online behaviour

#144

Post by dom0 »

andybak wrote: post #53
danfromberlin wrote: post #34

Who else feels a sense of horrible dread and frustration that every minutiae of my (and your) online activity is recorded for eternity and exploited to the fullest extent? What are you going to do about it?

I behave online with the understanding that my behaviour is essentially public. PS - how come all website product recommendations still suck? Data collection is rather ahead of data usage it seems...

> I behave online with the understanding that my behaviour is essentially public.

Also assume that the connection between any and all pseudonyms used only is public knowledge. Because it is.

Re: A demonstration of browser events used to monitor online behaviour

#145

Post by lonewolf_ninja »

pdkl95 wrote: post #137
SquareWheel wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You do know that the ad won't necessarily be relevant to you, right? Perhaps, but I don't really see the difference in the end. Anecdotally, I see ads for IntelliJ IDEA because I look up a lot of coding-related things. So does it matter that I'm getting this ad because Google's ad network has decided I like coding, or because IntelliJ selected some parameters and said "send this ad to coders"? The goal of either ope…

> making my life worse > technology improves my life in many ways First of all, it might not be about you . If you are privileged enough to not have to worry about being the target of prejudices, hatred, or the occasional witch hunt, then you might not see the necessity of keeping secrets. Some people are not that lucky. > making my life worse It probably isn't making your life worse at the moment . Right now we have…

Your point is quite valid about using data for financial decisions and underwriting which is in-fact already happening in a lot of scenarios.

Re: A demonstration of browser events used to monitor online behaviour

#146

Post by korethr »

jagthebeetle wrote: post #139
ryan-c wrote: post #91

I got "Subject has run script to click on the button 10 times in one second" by using xdotool click --delay 10 --repeat 100 1, wonder whether that's checking timing or just assuming nobody clicks that fast.

Suspect it must be checking time, below didn't really trigger anything: for (var i = 0; i button.click(), Math.random()*1500) } I wish bundle.js weren't minified, it could be fun to read.

http://unminify.com/ might help.

Re: A demonstration of browser events used to monitor online behaviour

#147

Post by korethr »

pault wrote: post #133

> "Subject is privacy conscious, educated" 1/2

I was somewhat unnerved when I heard that -- my reaction being something along the lines of "Uhh, yeah, but who told you that?"

I'm curious how it determines these things, so I'm looking through the unminified JS, trying to understand it.

Now if it were to detect and call out that I was trying to reverse engineer it, that would be truly creepy.

Re: A demonstration of browser events used to monitor online behaviour

#148

Post by jzig »

drake01 wrote: post #95
axelfreeman wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a lot of fun automate this game and see the results. setInterval(function() {document.getElementsByTagName("a")[Math.floor(Math.random() * document.getElementsByTagName("a").length)].click()}, 5000)

or may be this: window.setInterval(function(){ [].forEach.call(document.querySelectorAll('a'), function (el){el.click();});},500)

It's funny to see the different variations. I used: `var x = setInterval(() => { for (element of document.getElementsByTagName('a')) { element.click() } }, 1000);`

Re: A demonstration of browser events used to monitor online behaviour

#149

Post by tomatohs »

GoToRO wrote: post #83

I used HotJar and it's pretty cool to see the actual website and the user navigating. This is a video of an actual recording a site owner will see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Odc4k4KXjc

I'm working on a similar project that aims to fully emulate the user's browser, http://screensquid.com

Re: A demonstration of browser events used to monitor online behaviour

#150

Post by kayge »

Roritharr wrote: post #38
ogig wrote: post #6

This reminded me that notch web game[1]. Both kept me interested and I find them a very pleasant form of art. [1] http://game.notch.net/drowning/

My desire to powergame this made the ending all the more tragic. I should rethink a few things i guess.

I wrote a python script to play it for me. Not sure what that says about me :)
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