News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Googlebot’s JavaScript random() function is deterministic by geocar on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @08:24AM (#16324184)
Buy an iPhone.

• Did proper random before anybody else

• Active countermeasures against cookie-based retargeting

• Popular enough market that merely having an iPhone in a geographic area doesn't single you out

There's a guy who downloads every page with curl. I see him on web logs. I think he must have some script that parses the amp pages out and does something with it, but because he's the only person in that geographic region who browses the web with curl, he's very easy to spot from a tracking perspective. On the other hand, because he's using curl, I don't think anyone wants to bother trying to show him an ad.

Re:Googlebot’s JavaScript random() function is deterministic by ccozan on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @08:40AM (#16324265)
That would be Stallman.
Re:Googlebot’s JavaScript random() function is deterministic by rkeene2 on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @09:47AM (#16324697)
Stallman would probably use GNU wget which is licensed under the terms of the GPL, while curl is licensed under a license derived from MIT/X consortium.
Re:Googlebot’s JavaScript random() function is deterministic by jameskegel on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @09:53AM (#16324741)
He would probably have someone print it for him, similar to his email queue. I email him from time to time and his disclaimer says this.
Re:Googlebot’s JavaScript random() function is deterministic by M_Bakhtiari on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @10:53AM (#16325247)
I've never heard him say anything bad about running MIT licensed software.

On the other hand, I think I've read a FAQ where he says he views web pages by having a script fetch the pages with wget and them emailing them to him, but I'm pretty sure that's simply because wget is free and does the job (being able to recursively download the necessary resources), not because it's GPL licensed.

Re:Googlebot’s JavaScript random() function is deterministic by kbenson on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @11:35AM (#16325619)
Obviously Stallman is modifying his wget user agent to show curl just to prevent fingerprinting him accurately... ;)
Re:Googlebot’s JavaScript random() function is deterministic by robterrell on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @09:15AM (#16324492)
I love the idea of someone individually targeting Stallman with ads.
Re:Googlebot’s JavaScript random() function is deterministic by shpx on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @01:12PM (#16326626)
"I am careful in how I use the Internet.

I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).

I occasionally also browse unrelated sites using IceCat via Tor. Except for rare cases, I do not identify myself to them. I think that is enough to prevent my browsing from being connected with me. IceCat blocks tracking tags and most fingerprinting methods."

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Re:Googlebot’s JavaScript random() function is deterministic by Sir_Cmpwn on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @11:00AM (#16325304)
For the record, Stallman uses GNU IceCat these days.
Re:Googlebot’s JavaScript random() function is deterministic by geocar on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @05:30PM (#16328600)
I don't believe it's RMS because this user appears to "browse" the web interactively. A lot of the sites he hits are on HN so I think he's a user here.
Re:Googlebot’s JavaScript random() function is deterministic by nebula on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @11:50AM (#16325804)
I used to browse with lynx till few years ago. I am not sure if it is practical to do that anymore. Most of the web is no longer friendly for text browsing.
Re:Googlebot’s JavaScript random() function is deterministic by Arbalest on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @05:41PM (#16328645)
Somewhat suprisingly, youtube is not too bad. I've used elinks to get a URL and then put that into youtube-dl. I suspect that any site that is designed to be friendly to a (vision impaired) screen reader is going to be friendly to text based browsing.
Re:Googlebot’s JavaScript random() function is deterministic by gregw134 on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @05:22PM (#16328544)
I'll second that. As someone who once worked on fingerprinting scripts I can tell you that iPhones of the same model are basically indistinguishable to Javascript.