Memories! I hid my top 6 and made a 'random friend' thing. It was an image i.e. http://whatever/random-friend.jpg that linked to http://whatever/forward-to-friend. The server served up a random profile picture - and crucially a cookie header that set the friend-id as a cookie that forward-to-friend would use to send you to the corresponding profile. I was _so_ proud of it at the time...

I did some research before writing an article. GitHub started proxying images in 2014, and there are a lot of repositories that use this technique to keep their stats. I think GitHub is OK with that.

Re: proxy security concerns:

>Unlike GitHub, most of them don't even bother proxying the image to hide IP, referrer, and browser agent. If you want to allow external images on your site, you must proxy them and hide everything about a person who requested it. > A person with bad intentions can trick a victim into opening your profile that looks completely legit and detect his IP and a browser.

Can you explain this in more detail? Given a profile host that doesn't proxy, how does that attack work?

Attack?

1. your browser opens image from external server (in this step the server gets your IP and potentially user agent as that's how browsers communicate with servers)

2. there is no step 2

What? My step 2: Go to ip addr and ask your favorite celebrity (whose ip you got) for an autograph and selfie together

The IP itself can be a very valuable information if you target famous people, politicians, criminals and so on.

Such people usually know, that clicking on random links is not safe.

I think I did this for emails sometime between 15 years ago and today

> the same way MySpace did back in the day.

For us that weren't around in MySpace era, how did they do that?

I can't remember much about images - but basically filtering out question-marks and equals symbols (i.e. ...thing.php?some=value) in a lot of places. I remember getting Facebook and when they first started their API it was a bit better thought out, so they loaded images on the user's behalf. Some great reading about 'hacking' myspace at the time: https://samy.pl/myspace/

Right. So you just had to serve a counter up via http://example.com/path/to/my/counter.gif and embed whatever info you needed in the path to get around this.