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I foresee a future where the Adblock crowd runs a plugin that randomizes the data returned by browsers. It wouldn't take many variations in user agent strings,

I foresee a future where the Adblock crowd runs a plugin that randomizes the data returned by browsers. It wouldn't take many variations in user agent strings, reported browser plugins, and system fonts to give you a quasi-anonymous footprint each time you visit a website.

neworbit 16y ago
or a completely identical infoblock - anonymity of the crowd
- pierrefar 16y ago
  Surely by labelling yourself with this identical info block you're marking yourself as a type of person?
  - neworbit 16y ago
    Obligatory "Life Of Brian": We are all individuals! You're correct. Whether this ends up being more distinctive or demarcative depends on how widely deployed it is. A few hundred and it's not very helpful, but if you have tens of millions of browsers reporting only "LOLCAT BROWSER" (or for old sk00l credit, "AOL") it may give data miners some headaches. It's kind of like Tor (or if I remember right, anonymizer.com) in those respects - until you have scale, it probably gets associated with shenanigans; once you hit the tipping point, it operates as desired/intended. But hell, I don't mind marking myself as a type of person who doesn't want intrusive ads. (Why yes, I do run adblock!)
SageRaven 16y ago
A couple of years ago, I set up privoxy to rotate my user agent string periodically, usually once an hour (once I even changed it once per request). As fun as this was, even when running adblock and noscript and flashblock, it was obviously not very effective. This kind of fingerprinting does not bode well for TOR users. What is required is an intermediate proxy that modifies the out-bound browser traffic to delete or randomly modify these highly-unique sets of info (font sets, plugin sets, etc.) presented by the browser. I'm still amazed at how much info flash, java, and javascript can glean about a system. I'm curious... is it possible to get the username or file/directory names readable by that user from the browser?

neworbit 16y ago

or a completely identical infoblock - anonymity of the crowd

pierrefar 16y ago
Surely by labelling yourself with this identical info block you're marking yourself as a type of person?
- neworbit 16y ago
  Obligatory "Life Of Brian": We are all individuals! You're correct. Whether this ends up being more distinctive or demarcative depends on how widely deployed it is. A few hundred and it's not very helpful, but if you have tens of millions of browsers reporting only "LOLCAT BROWSER" (or for old sk00l credit, "AOL") it may give data miners some headaches. It's kind of like Tor (or if I remember right, anonymizer.com) in those respects - until you have scale, it probably gets associated with shenanigans; once you hit the tipping point, it operates as desired/intended. But hell, I don't mind marking myself as a type of person who doesn't want intrusive ads. (Why yes, I do run adblock!)

SageRaven 16y ago

A couple of years ago, I set up privoxy to rotate my user agent string periodically, usually once an hour (once I even changed it once per request). As fun as this was, even when running adblock and noscript and flashblock, it was obviously not very effective. This kind of fingerprinting does not bode well for TOR users. What is required is an intermediate proxy that modifies the out-bound browser traffic to delete or randomly modify these highly-unique sets of info (font sets, plugin sets, etc.) presented by the browser. I'm still amazed at how much info flash, java, and javascript can glean about a system. I'm curious... is it possible to get the username or file/directory names readable by that user from the browser?