mwheelz
mwheelz on Hacker News
Posted by
mwheelz on Friday May 29, 2026 @01:10PM
from the show-hn dept.
https://sinceyouarrived.world/taken/agents
The premise is web pages have two readers, people and the AI reading for people. Web pages can now be written more for the AI and less for people. It’s a companion to an earlier page about browser fingerprinting.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062178)On my page, the there’s a planted phrase for AI. As the site gets crawled, you can see if this phrase is ever returned by any AI...
Thanks for that. The page isn't trying to tell anyone something they don't already know, it's trying to put it in front of the people who haven't been told. The bug reports today have been gold and the volume is meaningfully better for them.
Confirmed. Firefox's privacy hardening returns "Mozilla, or similar" or just "Mozilla" as the renderer string. Chrome doesn't (yet). My parser was treating the Firefox string as if it were ANGLE format and grabbing the wrong half. Fixed.
Right, IP-to-geo is approximate and gets a lot of cases wrong (yours among them). Most ad networks use it as a region/DMA hint, and not precise positioning. The point of including it isn't precision. It's that any location is more than nothing, and the visitor never opted in.
Pedantic but right. The JS queries them; the browser returns them without prompting the user. "Volunteered" is the editorial verb for that round-trip but it does paper over a layer.
The 39 GB number is a bug. I was reading quota (browser allow-up-to ceiling) and calling it "allocated." Fixed; pushing now. Contrast is intentional but I hear you. not changing it but noted, and a cleaner reading mode is on the to-do later.
Both linked in the Sources & Confessions modal at the bottom. Cover Your Tracks is the spiritual ancestor of this whole piece. amiunique is more rigorous; this is the editorial cousin.
Real bug. Firefox returns "Mozilla, or similar" for the renderer string and my parser was grabbing the second half. Fixed; pushing in a minute. Your GPU is fine. Your browser is doing the right thing.
The GPU string really is the spicy one combined with screen + fonts it's enough to single you out across most of the open web. The card itself is a tank.
Posted by
mwheelz on Friday May 08, 2026 @08:37AM
from the sinceyouarrived.world dept.
Posted by
mwheelz on Friday April 24, 2026 @03:39PM
from the sinceyouarrived.world dept.
It sits on the "Verso · Of What Was Taken" side, so the framing is tilted. But I didn't want to argue it explicitly on the page. Some might see a loss (a human conversation that would have or could have happened otherwise). Some see a gain (knowledge access at scale). The "not people" phrasing is meant to invite the question, not answer it.
Posted by
mwheelz on Friday April 17, 2026 @09:14AM
from the sinceyouarrived.world dept.