Marco.org

May 30 2008 ∞

SocialHistory.js

(via marc)

This is ingenious and a little scary. Normally, Javascript doesn’t have access to your browser’s history URLs. But Aza Raskin found a way:

How does SocialHistory.js know? By using a cute information leak introduced by CSS. The browser colors visited links differently than non-visited links. All you have to do is load up a whole bunch of URLs for the most popular social bookmarking sites in an iframe and see which of those links are purple and which are blue. It’s not perfect (which, from a privacy perspective, is at least a little comforting) but it does get you 80% of the way there. The best/worst part is that this information leak probably won’t be plugged because it’s a fundamental feature of the browser.

Incredible.

Now any website has a reliable way to detect whether you have recently visited any particular URL.

This probably isn’t good.

  1. nickmynuk reblogged this from pile
  2. jonascarlsson reblogged this from marco and added:
    I like the smartness of the idea though. The easy solution to a difficult problem. Privacy wise it’s not the best...
  3. jso reblogged this from pile and added:
    Clever thinking - but I thought that bug was fixed years ago?
  4. gumnos reblogged this from marco
  5. caseyliss reblogged this from marco and added:
    This is for the geeks. As an engineer, I admire this for the creativity and relative simplicity. As a person, I’m also a...
  6. kiyo reblogged this from marco
  7. seanahern reblogged this from soxiam
  8. brocatus reblogged this from marco and added:
    …but very clever en ingeniously lo-tek.
  9. wakeupbrandon reblogged this from pile
  10. abhilashr reblogged this from marco and added:
    Holy crap! So simple. Yet something that I’ve never thought of. Incredible!
  11. pile reblogged this from marco
  12. dariosalvelli reblogged this from marco and added:
    Un JavaScript che ti aiuta a capire quali siti sociali e di social bookmarking (come Digg) usano i visitatori e gli...
  13. craig reblogged this from marco
  14. pdl2h reblogged this from marco
  15. marco reblogged this from marc and added:
    Incredible. Now any website has a reliable way...detect whether you have recently visited...
  16. marc reblogged this from saar and added:
    I don’t know whether to be amazed at the creativity of this or angered by the invasion of privacy.
  17. saar reblogged this from soxiam and added:
    Nice!! :) soxiam:
  18. hereharehere reblogged this from soxiam and added:
    This will detect any site...detect. Not sure about this one. soxiam:
  19. soxiam posted this