Websites have a new way to spy on visitors: analyzing their SSD activity

Post by rayiner » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 1:20 PM UTC

noirscape wrote: post #45

blfr wrote: post #6

Wait, wait, wait: browsers allow websites to store junk on my drive? They take up gigabytes of memory and still write to disk on top of this? Without even asking whether the site can use local storage? Years and years back when laptops still had HDDs, I had a script to put the Firefox profile &c on a ramdisk and sync it on reboots so that it didn't spin up the drive constantly. I guess I should have kept doing it. It…

Browsers have an absolute insane level of relatively unchecked permissions to do whatever they want on a client. There's a lot of effort by browser developers to scope creep the browser into essentially being an OS-agnostic tech stack (one where, conveniently, code can be shipped across the network "as necessary", removing a lot of user agency for the software being ran); Chrome being the biggest driver of this, whil…

Post by Narishma » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 1:45 PM UTC

Tangurena2 wrote: post #57

noirscape wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers have an absolute insane level of relatively unchecked permissions to do whatever they want on a client. There's a lot of effort by browser developers to scope creep the browser into essentially being an OS-agnostic tech stack (one where, conveniently, code can be shipped across the network "as necessary", removing a lot of user agency for the software being ran); Chrome being the biggest driver of this, whil…

Flash ended up getting blocked/banned by all browsers because it turned into a giant gaping security hole. > By January 2021, all major browsers were blocking all Flash content unconditionally. It looks like we-the-users need to be blocking any and every one of these parasites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash

Post by runako » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 1:59 PM UTC

cinntaile wrote: post #42

hulitu wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this obviously a capability of Web browsers? The main capability is RCE, but it seems that they need a way to store the payload.

There's a whole trend with websites not uploading anything to their servers due to privacy and whatnot, where do you suppose the data is being saved for repeat visits...

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 2:02 PM UTC

nozzlegear wrote: post #22

kccqzy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without even asking whether the site can use local storage? Where did you see this in the article? I had some recollection that Firefox at least did require asking the user.

Firefox doesn't ask permission just to use localstorage, no modern browser does this. The closest thing you get is when a site wants to persist storage with "navigator.storage.persist()", which should prompt you for permission. But localstorage data usually persists anyway, and only gets deleted if the browser's storage is "under pressure", so I've never personally worked on a site or web app that had to use that API…

Post by freedomben » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 2:14 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #61

noirscape wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers have an absolute insane level of relatively unchecked permissions to do whatever they want on a client. There's a lot of effort by browser developers to scope creep the browser into essentially being an OS-agnostic tech stack (one where, conveniently, code can be shipped across the network "as necessary", removing a lot of user agency for the software being ran); Chrome being the biggest driver of this, whil…

Now that we have AI, can we go back to real apps and native tech stacks? And revert the browser to a text-display interface?