Python 3.11 in the Web Browser

Re:Python 3.11 in the Web Browser by colordrops on Saturday March 26, 2022 @09:55PM (#30817063)

This would work if you only visited like 5 sites. If you visit thousands, and more like tens of thousands when you consider 3rd party embedded content, you can't figure out which sites a user visits, but rather only which ones they don't.

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Re:Python 3.11 in the Web Browser by EwanToo on Sunday March 27, 2022 @04:22AM (#30818659)

It worked pretty effectively.

Think about the 10,000s of JavaScript libraries out there, and the 100s of versions of each.

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Re:Python 3.11 in the Web Browser by madacol on Sunday March 27, 2022 @08:00AM (#30819583)

number of libraries * number of versions ~= bits of information to classify you

A good intuition is that although there's low certainty which site you have visited, there's high certainty which sites you HAVE NOT visited

I think is easier to see how you can fingerprint someone based on the set of sites they HAVE NOT visited

Edit: I'm not so sure anymore, I think that requires to test looots of libraries, it's not practical unless you are a really nasty ad company that tests hundreds of libraries in the background really sucking up your bandwidth

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Re:Python 3.11 in the Web Browser by madacol on Sunday March 27, 2022 @08:13AM (#30819655)

I got a better idea

Imagine ad companies choose libraries that are roughly used by 50% of users, if they test you with 10 of those, they learn ~10bits of entropy to classify you, i.e. which of the 1024 classifications you belong

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