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I Stored a Website in a Favicon

timwehrle.de

41–50 of 120 posts

Re: I Stored a Website in a Favicon

#42
post #5

You can use the favicon cache as storage too, by redirecting users across domains. It's been proposed as a potential fingerprinting risk[0], and if a browser naively reuses the cache for incognito mode, it could be used to track users across browser profiles. [0]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/browser-track...

My thoughts instinctively went to "this has to be being used for fingerprinting" when I read OPs blog. Are anti fingerprinting measures taking into account the use of the canvas api with favicons?

The link to the supercookie site is dead unfortunately.

Re: I Stored a Website in a Favicon

#43
post #6

Pretty cool tbh!!! Would have loved seeing the decoder code!!! It's also pretty interesting to think how an attacker could exploit images on his behalf. Never thought that would be a way!!! Thanks!

I guess the decoder is more than the 208 bytes that this page uses.. But maybe you can misuse this and store a session ID / cookie in a favicon (give everyone a unique one) and survive some cookie cleanup and evade privacy restrictions? Maybe you can still make it that the favicon looks like an image a little to not raise suspicion? Favicons seem to be cached across private browsing sessions. Oh no

I'm tempted to think that only someone working for a company in the advertising industry could come up with that.

Must EVERYTHING be polluted by ad tech & privacy intrusions?

Re: I Stored a Website in a Favicon

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but it's kinda weird. The typical LLM headers and bullet points are there, but it's like someone took an axe to the rest of the spew. I too would rather read someone's original bad writing than their bad editing of AI writing, but it's kinda interesting how this all shakes out.

It doesn't seem to be LLM, but reads like one. The author is German, maybe it's a language expertise thing, maybe he likes the LLM style (unrelated to his nationality). But yeah, sentences that only have 3-4 word each feel like 3rd grade writing; I couldn't read it.

Hey, I've always written like this. In school I couldn't stand subordinate clauses and long sentences because I'd lose my train of thought. But yea, I've noticed that people often find it hard to read so I'm going to work on that

Re: I Stored a Website in a Favicon

#47
post #33

I found the agressively staccato, clearly LLM-generated content extremely difficult to read.

for the first time in a while on HN, i disagree with the characterisation as AI-generated. at most it was drafted with an LLM, but the final output is pretty human to me. they used the wrong it’s/its, made But. its own one-word sentence, didn’t capitalise HTML, and used “okayy” in parenthesis. all of this isn’t to criticise the writer - i enjoyed it more seeing these little imperfections that make up a blog post

Looks largely AI-written, with some human edits: https://www.pangram.com/history/9afe7542-1085-4264-9691-2172...

FWIW -- I'm not as repulsed by it as the parent comment. But I do want to substantiate that it _is_ heavily LLM-written.

(If you're unfamiliar, Pangram has garnered a reputation as the leading LLM-detector, with a minimal rate of false positives; IME this has come with the tradeoff of being easy to manipulate/tweak your way into turning an LLM-generated piece of text into reporting a false negative, but for most folks that's worthwhile.)

Re: I Stored a Website in a Favicon

#49
A neat improvement would be to make the decoder into a bookmarklet. This would avoid the overhead of serving the script. Of course you would rely on the user having the bookmarklet installed, but when you serve HTML you also rely on the user having a web browser installed.
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