News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by Pxtl on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @02:02PM (#12695160)
FYI, it's very NSFW in the back-end. Your browser is sending requests to obvious porn servers when you hit this link so it can test if you're logged in to them.
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by 0942v8653 on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @03:39PM (#12695855)
A more SFW version (took out YouPorn):

http://codepen.io/anon/pen/ALdqox/right/

This version connects to squareup.com, twitter.com, www.facebook.com, accounts.google.com, accounts.google.com, plus.google.com, login.skype.com, www.flickr.com, www.spotify.com, www.reddit.com, www.tumblr.com, www.expedia.de, www.dropbox.com, www.amazon.com, www.pinterest.com, www.netflix.com, de.foursquare.com, eu.battle.net, store.steampowered.com, www.academia.edu, stackoverflow.com, accounts.google.com, github.com, medium.com, news.ycombinator.com, carbonmade.com, courses.edx.org, www.spiegel.de, slack.com, www.khanacademy.org, www.paypal.com

Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by Zeklandia on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @05:58PM (#12696733)
This one actually works for me! The other said that I was using Privacy Badger since it couldn't detect anything. I'm not, but I am using uBlock Origin. This one is only wrong about a couple (it doesn't register, for example, that I am logged in to G+, Khan Academy, Steam, Amazon, PayPal, or Skype).
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by oolongCat on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @08:51PM (#12697565)
You can actually have privacy badger black all of this if you play around with the settings.

I mean I think its too much to ask for a tool to be able to block everything right without a little human assistance.

Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by Ph0X on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @08:12PM (#12697411)
Doesn't uBlock have a filter specifically for privacy (off by default I believe).
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by JeremyNT on Thursday October 13, 2016 @10:20AM (#12700925)
I actually had several of the extra filters enabled already, but only once I added "Fanboy's Enhanced Tracking List"[0] did uBlock Origin successfully block this technique. I'm not sure whether any of the other filters would accomplish the same result.

After enabling this filter, 0942v8653's version also failed.

[0] https://www.fanboy.co.nz/enhancedstats.txt

Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by subliminalpanda on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @09:47PM (#12697795)
It has several you can choose from in fact, can be enabled in the options pane.
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by turc1656 on Thursday October 13, 2016 @11:14AM (#12701261)
Thanks for the SFW version. Nice to see that uMatrix is doing it's job quite well and as expected.

FWIW, Spotify doesn't seem to get recognized properly. I am definitely logged in and it should show up when all my browser protections are disabled. HN showed up when I disabled everything, but not Spoitfy.

Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by throwanem on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @02:52PM (#12695536)
Yeah, that would've been nice to know ahead of time. Why not, for example, trigger the test when someone clicks a button, rather than taking someone's page visit as permission to try lighting up their organization's content filter?
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by ktta on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @02:55PM (#12695557)
I think it helps in conveying the fact that it is a vulnerability not a feature.

So any website (even your own company's internal one) can check stuff like this. And you can't do anything about it. Other than always using private browsing for anything you don't want your company/anyone else to know about.

Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by throwanem on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @03:06PM (#12695635)
I mean, if somebody is logged into YouPorn from work, that's not a problem I expect the developer of a tool like this to solve. What I expect the developer of a tool like this to do is not create problems by just arbitrarily making HTTP requests to porn sites without a prompt or a chance to opt out. That's a dick move.
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by drvdevd on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @04:06PM (#12696039)
When I first read that it was making these requests here in the comments, my reaction was similar. But then upon reflection, I don't think there's a problem for the author here. Why? Because all I did was click the link. Meaning if I was behind a corporate firewall or the like, this sort of thing could be happening all the time and unless I was always tracing requests in my browser or via MITM or logging DNS, I'd have no way of knowing.

Personally I view this as a browser and/or protocol issue (the kind that has trickled down from the origins of the web) and really can't fault the author for it. In fact I think it's appropriate the author left these requests in as it reflects an actual attack scenario better perhaps.

Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by throwanem on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @04:13PM (#12696086)
The point I'm making is that it's not necessary to hit a porn site in order to get the point across, and there are HN users whose organizations observe and don't care for that kind of thing.
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by TeMPOraL on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @04:47PM (#12696298)
Then how can such organizations handle other people randomly putting references to porn sites on their websites? With today's Internet being what it is, you can't assume that a request to YouPorn means someone is browsing porn at work. For all you know, the request could have been sent by an ad.

Then again, businesses in general aren't exactly paragons of intelligence either, so I wouldn't be surprised if someone made a fuss about it...

Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by coverband on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @05:18PM (#12696492)
Absolutely!... If your company is doing web filtering, it will report an attempted hit from your browser to the YP site.
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by oldmanjay on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @08:22PM (#12697450)
Yet another inequality to throw in the hopper
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by ge96 on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @05:20PM (#12696508)
In bird culture, this is considered a dick move.
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by sperglord on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @03:10PM (#12695662)
I believe using private browsing wouldn't matter. The IP I'm browsing from is still going to try pinging all those porn servers, and that's what's getting logged in the filter, not my browser history.
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by ktta on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @10:02PM (#12697863)
In my second paragraph, I was actually talking about your company sending such requests to know what you are logged into. Doesn't matter if you're using it right now. If you're logged in from days before, your cookies will be there. In incognito they won't be.
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by JoshMnem on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @05:24PM (#12696532)
Privacy Badger will stop that tool if you edit the settings.
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by Hondor on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @11:16PM (#12698189)
What a surprising problem. If the boss mistakenly accuses you of watching porn - why not explain why they're wrong and show them the site? If they won't accept that, then it means you're in danger with any web surfing you do at work and should already not be clicking random links. It's not the site's fault, it's your company's fault and your own for not protecting yourself against breaking their rules.
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by derefr on Thursday October 13, 2016 @12:56AM (#12698527)
Personally, the idea that there's a network my traffic flows over, where that traffic is sniffed such that its content could potentially result in things like me losing my job, is just debilitating to me.

If I worked for such a company, all my traffic would be flowing over a VPN, full-stop.

Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by draugadrotten on Thursday October 13, 2016 @04:21AM (#12699278)
> If I worked for such a company, all my traffic would be flowing over a VPN, full-stop.

When you work for such a company, all VPNs are blocked and prohibited, full-stop.

Source: worked for such a company

Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by oarsinsync on Thursday October 13, 2016 @07:52AM (#12700046)
Pretty standard in any reasonably secure financial services org.

All direct Internet access is blocked and prohibited, with all attempts to access the Internet (tcp/80, tcp/443) transparently proxied via Bluecoat/Websense/Forcepoint/etc proxies, which filter based on URL categorisation. WSS generally doesn't work in this kind of environment. Everything else is dropped.

Any attempts to bypass filtering is a violation of IT policy and is sackable. Visiting sites that are blocked gets logged, doesn't generally get flagged up unless is a daily occurrence, and the first assumption is usually malware.

Source: Worked for several such companies, was responsible for perimeter security in some.

Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by user5994461 on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @03:59PM (#12695994)
Tried it and... imagine my disappointment to find out it's ONLY connecting to youporn.

"very NSFW" and "serverS" were overstatements.

Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by echelon on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @05:04PM (#12696409)
This is definitely NSFW if your workplace monitors the domains you connect to.
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by user5994461 on Thursday October 13, 2016 @02:39PM (#12703010)
The monitoring must have funny statistics with all the ads going to <explicitdomain>.com
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by Pxtl on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @04:31PM (#12696206)
I figured "warn first, confirm the details later".
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by xexers on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @06:14PM (#12696838)
Corporate IT admins, care to comment here? If you see a single connection to youporn, do alarm bells go off?
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by ganeshkrishnan on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @11:16PM (#12698187)
Yes, we initiate protocol zero once the sirens sound off.

IT team then calls in air support

Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by dataharry on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @06:57PM (#12697035)
Yes, and then we bring out the fire hoses
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by simplemath on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @09:35PM (#12697751)
No one is actually watching.
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by Capira on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @09:09PM (#12697643)
I removed the request to Youporn. Sorry if it caused any trouble.
Re:Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW) by mablap on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @08:36PM (#12697511)
Well, that was not very nice. Should have asked confirmation. I clicked on the link thinking there would be an explanation of what this project does.