How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him

Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him by erentz on Sunday July 01, 2018 @03:36PM (#17437140)

Jesus. I wanted to keep reading that article but half way through my phone was hot enough it was burning my fingers and 20% of my battery had disappeared. What on earth is Politico doing.

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Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him by jrockway on Sunday July 01, 2018 @06:47PM (#17438119)

It's quite the thing. I profiled it with and without ads, and it looks like the ads are the culprit. There are two of them just sitting there using CPU time the entire time the page is open. (I had two Facebook ads that had animated text being typed. They continued to use 100% of the CPU even when the animation was complete.)

There should really be some sort of CPU/power budget enforced by one's phone on a per page basis. If there's no user action going on, a page should only be allowed to run a certain number of instructions.

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Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him by Raticide on Sunday July 01, 2018 @11:48PM (#17439226)

It's always the adverts that screw up a site. Maybe it's mining crypto currency too?

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Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him by giancarlostoro on Sunday July 01, 2018 @09:05PM (#17438672)

I recommend FireFox Focus for mobile. It blocks JS and third party tracking by default. I wish they'd let you toggle between either of those options instead of both at once though.

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Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him by Sean1708 on Monday July 02, 2018 @06:59AM (#17440654)

Or normal FireFox with uBlock Origin if you want to maintain history, logins, etc.

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Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him by eftychis on Sunday July 01, 2018 @08:20PM (#17438515)

Yeah -- my advice is to use a good adblocker/tracker blocker (ublock origin, ghostery etc). Power consumption/CPU load and memory usage for browsers change considerably.

P.S. Yes, people are paying power and time (cpu/personal) to watch ads to pay (?!) for websites and provide private information.

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Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him by alistproducer2 on Sunday July 01, 2018 @07:02PM (#17438184)

I keep JS turned off by default on my phone and make exceptions. Brave browser makes it super easy to do this. Politico was actually the reason I started doing this.

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Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him by mthoms on Sunday July 01, 2018 @08:02PM (#17438441)

Just one of many great reasons to use Brave.

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Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him by lhuser123 on Sunday July 01, 2018 @08:08PM (#17438462)

Wao, just installed Brave and it also has fingerprinting protection. Does that really works ? I didn’t find it in Firefox.

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Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him by walid on Sunday July 01, 2018 @05:24PM (#17437693)

Probably crypto mining.

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Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him by kragormonkey on Sunday July 01, 2018 @05:30PM (#17437725)

I thought I was imagining that! If somebody knows a good JavaScript profiler, I might send a screenshot of that to the author. Hopefully they will choose a better outlet next time, or fix the Politico site.

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Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him by MR4D on Sunday July 01, 2018 @05:18PM (#17437657)

Tracking you. ;)

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Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him by curiousgal on Sunday July 01, 2018 @05:51PM (#17437834)

Firefox Focus is your friend.

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Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him by Can_Not on Sunday July 01, 2018 @10:11PM (#17438891)

I found focus to be woefully unfeatured compared to just using Firefox's incognito. Last time I tried it, you couldn't install any extensions (privacy badger, ublock origin, etc.) and also couldn't disable JS.

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Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him by downer63 on Sunday July 01, 2018 @09:28PM (#17438749)

A condom ain't nothin' but a bridge for a crab, lad.

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Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him by woolvalley on Sunday July 01, 2018 @11:26PM (#17439148)

Ad networks need to add simple perf tracing to the ads they serve and boot off the high consuming ones.

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