Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

Re:Where Am I? NYTimes or Google? by pwdisswordfish2 on Saturday July 04, 2020 @04:06AM (#23730904)

By reading the source code?

    def divisors(n):
        for d in range(1, n):
            if n % d == 0:
                yield d

    n = 1
    while True:
        if n == sum(divisors(n)):
            break
        n += 2
    print(n)

I don’t know if this program halts. But I’m pretty sure it won’t steal my data and send it to third parties. Why? Because at no point does it read my data or communicate with third parties in any way: it would have to have those things programmed into it for that to be a possibility. At no point I had to solve the halting problem to know this.

Also, if I execute a program and it does exhibit that behaviour, that’s a proof right there.

The same kind of analysis can be applied to Google’s scripts: look what data it collects and where it pushes data to the outside world. If there are any undecidable problems along the way, then Google has no plausible deniability that some nefarious behaviour is possible. Now, whether that is a practical thing to do is another matter; but the halting problem is just a distraction.

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Re:Where Am I? NYTimes or Google? by pdkl95 on Saturday July 04, 2020 @05:55AM (#23731291)

> at no point does it read my data

Tracking doesn't require reading any of your data. All that is necessary is to trigger some kind of signal back to Google's servers on whatever user behavior they are interested in tracking.

> or communicate with third parties

Third parties like Google? Which is kind of the point?

> [example source code]

Of course you can generate examples that are trivial to inspect. Real world problems are far harder to understand. Source is minified/uglified/obfuscated, and "bad" behaviors might intermingle with legitimate actions.

Instead of speculating, here is Google's JS for AMP pages:

https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js

How much tracking does that library implement? What data does it exfiltrate from the user's browser back to Google? It obviously communicates with Google's servers; can you characterize if these communications are "good" or "bad"?

Even if you spent the time and effort to manually answer these questions, the javascript might change at any time. Unless you're willing to stop using all AMP pages every time Google changes their JS and you perform another manual inspection, you are going to need some sort of automated process that can inspect and characterize unknown programs. Which is where you will run into the halting problem.

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Re:Where Am I? NYTimes or Google? by pwdisswordfish2 on Sunday July 05, 2020 @01:30AM (#23736808)

Funny how people can literally "forget" that Google is a third party. Probably people at Google believe they are not third parties. Not even asking or trust, just assuming it. No other alternatives. Trust relationship by default.

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Re:Where Am I? NYTimes or Google? by saagarjha on Saturday July 04, 2020 @05:01AM (#23731100)

> I don’t know if this program halts.

Be cool if you did ;)

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Re:Where Am I? NYTimes or Google? by FabHK on Saturday July 04, 2020 @11:46AM (#23733046)

If you didn't catch the joke: It is currently unknown whether there are any odd perfect numbers (and the program halts on encountering the first).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_number

https://oeis.org/A000396

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