Oh, it's (re)randomised upon each restart, whew, thanks for the heads up

edit: er, I think that that also suggests that I need to restart firefox more often...

The webpage would have to scan the entire UUID space to create this fingerprint, which seems unlikely.

Just have a database of UUIDs. Seems pretty trivial to generate and sort as it's only 16 bytes each.

Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42342382

That's actually a bright idea! Have you ever thought about applying for VC funds?

Once you deliver that, you can also think about a database of natural numbers!

But that has no moat. Anyone can generate a database of natural numbers using SOTA models.

"Just" have a database, and then what? I can set up a database of all UUIDs very easily, but I don't think it's helpful.

Where are you storing them, a black hole?

All you need is basic compression, like storing the start and stop points of each block of UUIDs in the database.

Wait, you already linked to everyuuid. Do you think the server it's on uses black hole storage?

Fast writes, very slow reads.

I would store them as offsets within the digits of pi.

lol

Let's go a step further and just iterate through them on the client. I plan on having this phone well past the heat death of the universe, so this is guaranteed to finish on my hardware.

  function* uuidIterator() {
   const bytes = new Uint8Array(16); 
   while (true) {
     yield formatUUID(bytes);

     let carry = 1;
     for (let i = 15; i >= 0 && carry; i--) {
       const sum = bytes[i] + carry;
       bytes[i] = sum & 0xff;
       carry = sum > 0xff ? 1 : 0;
     }
 
     if (carry) return;
   }
 }
 
 function formatUUID(b) {
   const hex = [...b].map(x => x.toString(16).padStart(2, "0"));
   return (
     hex.slice(0, 4).join("") + "-" +
     hex.slice(4, 6).join("") + "-" +
     hex.slice(6, 8).join("") + "-" +
     hex.slice(8, 10).join("") + "-" +
     hex.slice(10, 16).join("")
   );
 }

This is free. Feel free to use it in production.

Free space heater

What license is this? Company policy says we can't use Apache licensed stuff.

It exists

https://everyuuid.com/

Woosh

someone took your joke and made it real

The write-up for it is surprisingly interesting! https://eieio.games/blog/writing-down-every-uuid/#toc:entrop...

16 bytes is a lot. 4 bytes are within reach, we can scan all of them quickly, but even 8 bytes are already too much.

Kolmogorov said that computers do not help with naturally hard tasks; they raise a limit compared to what we can fo manually, but above that limit the task stays as hard is it was.

Doing it on restart makes the mitigation de facto useless. How often do you have 10, 20, 30d (or even longer) desktop uptime these days? And no one is regularly restarting their core applications when their desktop is still up.

Enjoy the fingerprinting.

I restart my browser basically every day.

yeah I close out everything as a mental block against anything I'm working on.

I think there's a subset of people that offload memory to their browsers and that's kinda scary given how these fingerprint things work.

Umm, I restart my PC about once a week for security and driver updates.

If you don't, you have a lot more to worry about beyond fingerprinting...

Oh and I'm on LINUX (CachyOS) mind you.

You just need to open so many instances and tabs in each instance that it crashes every couple days

There isn't enough energy in the solar system to count to 2^128. Now a uuid v4 number "only" has 2^122 bits of entropy. Regardless, you cannot realistically scan the uuid domain. It's not even a matter of Moore's law, it is a limitation of physics that will stand until computers are no longer made of matter.

I don't think that's the case. I have the Earth View extension installed which shows a random google earth image.

I have this set as my homepage in Firefox as moz-extension://<extension-id>/index.html, and this has not changed since installing the extension. The page still works.