181–190 of 280 posts
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Or open up your laptop and (carefully) destroy it. I can’t remember the last time I used the built-in mic on a laptop, much less the last time I bought a laptop with a mic that was actually worth using.
> Or open up your laptop and (carefully) destroy it. OK, I destroyed it (carefully). Now it won't boot. What do I do next?
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IMHO, fingerprinting would explain the enumeration attempt, but not the attempt to access these devices.
Does accessing them give you extra fingerprinting data though? I would imagine that you can then enumerate at least the resolution of the camera.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaDevice...
I think this sounds more like some sort of fingerprinting attempt. It good to see that random access to these kind of resources fails due to new(er) browser controls. However, this does not mean that the fingerprinting actually failed. There is probably some way to determine if the request was denied automatically by the browser or manually by the user (e.g., time to get "response"), which is definitely something whi…
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I do wish google engineers would do something positive for society and switch to a career in subsistence farming. No one needs ads. Not arbitrary JS ads, not declarative ads, not personalised ads, not any ads.
But what do you see as the alternative for funding sites? The site we're on is funded by (declarative, non-personalized, non-obtrusive) ads. I would rather have ads than paywalls.
And for sure, I appreciate being able to buy stuff online. But I seem to be able to do that without viewing ads! Amazing!
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Why is it up to the advertisers and publishers?
If they tried to unilaterally make such a change and ban the old formats, both the advertisers and publishers would complain to competition regulators around the world. And whether you think there would be any merit to those complaints or not, the outcome would still be another round of lawsuits with billions on the line.
Not my money. Why should I care about lawsuits between advertising networks and their advertisers, regulators and so on?
After you enable that, a settings button will appear when you pull down your notification/settings menu for "Sensors Off". This disables the microphone, camera, fingerprint reader, accelerometer and other sensors.
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> This is likely a script that somehow avoided google's malware scanning pipelines. I can't think of a good reason for scripts through google ad syndication to be asking for camera and microphone permissions. I'd assume Google runs these scripts in something like a lab environment to see what's ultimately invoked before deploying them to production? If so, would this be indicative of both a deliberate controls bypass…
Yes - banner ads are constantly targeted by malicious actors. My employer pays a vendor something like $200k/mo for creative scanning to avoid issues like this. Google certainly spends tens of millions a year trying to avoid issues like this. See vendors like “the media trust”
The author is concerned that an ad might be able to surreptitiously turn on the camera or microphone, but these are not accessible by default. In this case, it isn't even getting as far as a permissions prompt because the default Feature Policy doesn't allow camera or mic access in cross-origin iframes. (Ex, for Chrome: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/Home/chromium-se... ) Instead, I think the most likely…
The author is concerned that an ad might be able to surreptitiously turn on the camera or microphone You are correct, that is the author's concern. The reason the rest of us are concerned is because the general public has been conditioned by Google and others to just press "Accept" any prompt that pops up, no matter how dangerous.
I auto-press [Accept]. I use an ad-blocker. I reject 3rd-party cookies. I disable JS by default, and re-enable it selectively for sites that refuse to work without JS. If that re-enablement involves more than a few clicks, I'll close the site - there are other fish in the sea.
What am I doing wrong?
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I think there is most definitely conditioning going on. I watched my fiance click on one of the "accept all cookies" GDPR-prompts (it's become an antipattern) a few days ago. She almost automatically did it without thinking. I went to the same site on my laptop and if you clicked decline, it immediately brought up modal dialogs that made that site unusable. I can see why 99% of people would be conditioning to just hi…
And you blame Google for that, instead of some brain-dead Eurocrat?
This is not google, but a third party ad network serving ads through google. Google tries to sandbox the creatives in an attempt to prevent issues exactly like this, and develops browser features to prevent issues exactly like this. This is likely a script that somehow avoided google's malware scanning pipelines. This is definitely not google's malintent. Disclaimer: Ex googler, worked in ads, dealed with problems li…
Why allow anything in an ad besides text or images? Why allow others to run arbitrary code through your network. Inexcusable by Google imo.