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Discussion (70 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
They (or rather the LLM that wrote this) missed that this is possibly fingerprintable to browser version range, which is slightly more interesting. Most users aren't spoofing their user agent headers to be a different operating system. Most fingerprinting solutions aren't trying to infer your operating system, they only care about semi-unique things that show up.
It's an interesting finding. I wish they had taken some time to have a real person write it up. This is too heavily LLM written to ignore.
The people behind the LLM behind this blog post are. They're trying to pretend their robots are people to sell other websites' data to their customer. It's easier to pass bot detection gates if you pretend to be a physical machine running Windows or macOS than if you honestly admit you're using Linux on a VM.
And for the LLM writing, yes, it's written in the article and blog, it's not hidden or pretending, otherwise I would never publish an article due to lack of time, and I stand by it
Didn't even have time to finish their HN reply.
I prefer articles like this coming from the other side of the battle (fingerprint.js and friends) because at least their motives are clear.
We don't fingerprint for ad purposes, and we destroy PII for humans as fast as we can because PII should be treated as radioactive. But we see customers that are constantly burned by abusive scrapers and the scrapers aren't slowing down.
The current approach to scraping is strip mining the Internet and is having the corresponding pollution effects that you'd expect. I'm fine with individuals doing whatever weird automation they want, more power to you, but it's this industrial scale crawling and extraction that's degrading the Internet from all angles.
[1] https://arith2026.org/program.html (2nd keynote)
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 actually faster.
The precision argument also falls apart. Any float with mantissa >= X+Y can get exactly the same results as a QX.Y fixed point. The float will actually perform better across the same range because you have to round it to perform like the fixed point. That means more precision, lower error, automatic normalization, better overflow behavior, a larger working range, etc. And it'll probably be just as fast, unless you're bottlenecked on memory bandwidth of inputs (unlikely). When you inevitably want an exp() or another special function, it's a heck of a lot easier to call libm than implement your own and it will perform better.
Floats are also much easier to get right for your coworkers that aren't numerical analysts.
Multiplayer video games particularly benefit especially from being able to communicate player inputs + trivial metadata over the network and letting each client determistically simulate the correct state themselves vs. sending much larger state packets to keep players in sync.
> 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-math-os-fingerprint/
Why not criticize the content instead of the source or medium?
However, if you're customizing the behavior of tanh to the point where it returns a different result than any stock browser, you run the risk of ending up in a bucket of size 1, making fingerprinting trivial. (That being said, it might be a different bucket each time if the fingerprinting code doesn't specifically check whether tanh is random, which of course it likely doesn't.)
This guy: https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
Would not solve everything but still help a lot.
Javascript systems have long had polyfills for varied browser feature comparability gaps.
Whether you agree with these, making probing detection via fingerprinting illegal would take away this lever. Making surreptitious tracking via fingerprinting illegal? Even for state actors?
Yeah, that's probably reasonable. If someone is going to wear a tracking collar in exchange for "free" services, a little disclosure makes sense.
Yeah, tracking bad, I get it, but are whatever damages that kind of legislation would prevent (probably nothing measurable) really more important than fixing the easy, in our face social problems that politicians could instead be focusing on?
If you did it in just your store, that wouldn't be a problem. The correct analogy, however, is "why should it be illegal for me to attach a perfectly traceable and invisible air-tag to you when you enter my store, without your explicit consent, and subsequently follow and document your every movement no matter where you go, as long as that location has a business relationship with my store, and also my store is the most popular chain on the planet that has business relationships with basically any relevant business that exists." And I don't think the answer to this one shouldn't be particularly difficult to arrive at.
That's just a description of you that I share with my other stores. Casinos, Target, Burger King, etc all do this when you get 86'd, for example.
(I have no idea, I don't know too much about this)
If you have that right, the public should have the right to know you're doing this before they enter your store, so they can avoid it.
Same with the websites, they should, legally, have to say they're about to fingerprint you so that you can close your browser tab and never come back.
Man, why the fuck don't they just make a powerpoint with bullet points if all the sentences are like that.