6 ms·

Good find. Disproves the "only useful for web fingerprinting". It's also useful to their users for a fairly common flow. Don't assume malice, but do consider s

Good find. Disproves the "only useful for web fingerprinting". It's also useful to their users for a fairly common flow. Don't assume malice, but do consider side effects of your decisions. This does add an extra bit to web-fingerprinting, it's only 1 bit. Someone intentionally trying to add fingerprinting could do much more malicious things. Unique font names or uniquely generated font w varying letter widths could completely de-anonymize a user. This seems scoped to identifying team-viewer users, not identifying/fingerprinting individuals.

electroly 4y ago
This is still web fingerprinting. They are using this, specifically, for fingerprinting. They don't care about the font; they care about being able to spot TeamViewer users in a crowd. The only difference here is it's being done for a beneficial purpose. "TeamViewer installs font only useful for web fingerprinting" is absolutely true; only the word "suspicious" is untrue because now we know what it's for.
- throwaway290 4y ago
  Fingerprinting requires there to be a purpose of identifying an individual device, and is done by collecting multiple data points that in aggregate are a unique combination. Just knowing you have a font or TeamViewer, like just knowing your IP or viewport size, isn't fingerprinting your device.
  - dymk 4y ago
    They may not be baking a cake, but they have all the ingredients to bake a cake. They also give everybody else who is currently baking a cake an additional ingredient.
    - kaetemi 4y ago
      And according to the Internet, everything is cake.
      - merely-unlikely 4y ago
        the cake is a lie
    - EGreg 4y ago
      That’s why this attempt to stay anonymous — or even more ambitiously, prevent metadata from being aggregated to reveal mass patterns among many users - is useless. Eventually, everything will be collected using an actual use case — contacts, photos etc. — and the AI will process it and make deepfakes of anything. We won’t be able to trust any video evidence. The future is about watermarking and signing stuff using your own private keys. And even then, someone can just announce their private keys somewhere and have plausible deniability after that. Too many such renunciations though would be suspicious. The world is going to be as unfamiliar to us, breaking enough of our assumptions, as when people didn’t know about gramophones and televisions and instant communication, assuming that it would take time for a messenger to get a message out. Today we expect a ton of info to flow over always-on connections. Similarly our assumptions about identity and privacy and democracy are going to be totally smashed by AI and bots soon. Swarms of bots using GPT-4 and deepfakes will be able to drown out the vanishingly tiny amount of information that all the humans writing online produce, and adversarial networks will make them far more effective at convincing a crowd of humans thay X event happened or to support Y policy, or even rewrite history and science. The sams way that AlphaZero defeated AlphaGo which defeated human players, because it had far more combinations than all humanity combined did, and then downloaded the learnings to each node (Leela and others do the same). All that is missing is decentralized swarms of bots, that have no single point of failure, and can update their weights autonomously. I will go even further and say that CAPTCHAs will become irrelevant. Humans won’t be the primary economic actor for online services, because botnets will control far more capital and everyone will do some work for a botnet, such as being a caretaker etc. No one will even know or care who is giving the assignment or writing to them anymore. The sad part about this is that botnets based on GPT3 and deepfakes are simply bullshittes that don’t understand things like Cyc — they literally throw bullshit at a wall and see what sticks. It’s sad but this will collectively outperform collective human reasoning at convincing humans because ALL our systems are vulnerable to be subverted that way.
      - sofan 4y ago
        I'd rather we try for change than stagnate in the current state of the world. Have a little faith in humanity.
    - throwaway290 4y ago
      You don't get to call a thing something it isn't simply because you don't like that thing. The action of taking your fingerprint to identify you is fingerprinting. Providing you a handrail without a purpose of identifying you, even though it happens to take your fingerprint for anyone else, is not fingerprinting. Changing your fingerprint is not fingerprinting. This is an abuse of a technology with more harm then benefit if you ask me. Calling it "fingerprinting" is still a category error.
      - dymk 4y ago
        Changing something about the device so you can identify that device (or set of devices) later on is literally electronic fingerprinting.
        hayalci 4y ago
        Repeatedly claiming something doesn't make it true. Here's what the Electronic Frontier Foundation says about fingerprinting. """Digital fingerprinting is the process where a remote site or service gathers little bits of information about a user's machine, and puts those pieces together to form a unique picture, or "fingerprint," of the user's device""" From: https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/what-fingerprinting https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/what-fingerprinting Here what TeamViewer is doing isn't fingerprinting. it's not combining unrealated bits of information to uniquely identify a user/computer. it's looking at literally one bit of information to identify whether the current non-uniquely-known user is in a -large- group or not, the group of "computers with teamviewer installed". it can be claimed that this is adding to the bits that can improve a third party's ability to uniquely identify a user/computer, but that's a different claim, that's not what teamviewer is doing.
  - cyanydeez 4y ago
    Any unique data point can be used in building a finger print. The forest for the tree here
  - cyanydeez 4y ago
    It identifies who has teams and who doesn't. Headline says "fingerprinting" If it's public information exposed through a browser and uniquely provides a bit of info, it's good for fingerprinting. End of line.
    - throwaway290 4y ago
      > It identifies who has teams and who doesn't. Which is not fingerprinting. > Headline says "fingerprinting" Which is obvious clickbait. Learn the terms.
      - cyanydeez 4y ago
        You don't understand how fingerprinting works, both LItTerAllY and for browsers.
- hnbad 4y ago
  It's less of a fingerprint and more of a shibboleth[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
jonatron 4y ago
A side effect is that it allows anyone running a website to build a database of TeamViewer installs behind IP addresses. If there was a TeamViewer security issue, that database could be useful.
- ST2084 4y ago
  This was my first reaction.
- collinmanderson 4y ago
  Yes, this key point is missing from the rest of the discussion. _Any_ website can tell whether or not you have TeamViewer installed. Ad networks could theoretically target you based on whether or not you have TeamViewer installed. I’m not assuming malice, but it’s a much bigger privacy hole than just increasing fingerprinting by a few bits.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
stuckinhell 4y ago
They days of not assuming malice are long past. We have many documented cases of malice from corporations and world governments. We must assume malice and push back on the invasion of our rights.
- mwcampbell 4y ago
  The fact that some corporations and governments are guilty doesn't mean they all are. And the fact that they're guilty of some things doesn't mean we should assume they're guilty of others. It's no different than with people; corporations and governments are made of people, after all. Besides, the constant negativity is just exhausting for all involved. I'm glad intellectual curiosity won out on this thread, at least for now.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    That's true, but as soon as you allow something, you're probably allowing it for all time for all future governments.
vel0city 4y ago
Its technically more than one bit, as it has a different version of the font for each major version of Teamviewer. So there are several different fonts Teamviewer may have installed depending on when you installed it.
jacquesm 4y ago
1 bit is pretty good when you only need 33 (soon 34).
TehCorwiz 4y ago
It's more than that. The font encodes the version of Zoom that is installed.
neodypsis 4y ago
What can a user do to protect him/herself against malicious fingerprinting using web fonts?
midislack 4y ago
In todays world, ALWAYS assume malice.
- mwcampbell 4y ago
  The world is, to some extent, what we make it. If we're going to make it better, we can't give up so completely; we have to have hope that the world can be made better, and that we're not alone in trying to do so. That's why I choose to assume that the TeamViewer developers are merely trying to make the best of the constraints they're working in, i.e. no proper way for a website to determine whether the custom protocol handler is already installed. In their situation, I would probably be forced to do the same thing, and I wouldn't appreciate such negativity. I assume you wouldn't either.
  - midislack 4y ago
    In short "bend over, we're coming in, but SMILE while we do" eh? This isn't working any more. You did this.
norwalkbear 4y ago
I wouldn't assume malice if this was a small startup of 4-5 Richard Stallmans or maybe 20 years ago. In this case, I think it IS malice. The font encodes way more data that you'd expect. Assuming malice from corporations should be the default in today's society.
- Agamus 4y ago
  Precisely my thoughts, though I think this is more problematic than simple, nefarious malice. Sometimes it is the case that no one behind the decisions is being malicious - e.g., perhaps just trying to accomplish a task at hand on a tight timeline. As such, the default in today's society, where we are more or less 'on our own' on this issue, should be to assume that even while that vehicle over there is indeed about to plow into the crowd, there is often no one behind the wheel. We should default to an even more suspicious approach.
takeda 4y ago
> This does add an extra bit to web-fingerprinting, it's only 1 bit. Every single bit doubles the value so 1 bit could still be a lot.

electroly 4y ago

This is still web fingerprinting. They are using this, specifically, for fingerprinting. They don't care about the font; they care about being able to spot TeamViewer users in a crowd. The only difference here is it's being done for a beneficial purpose. "TeamViewer installs font only useful for web fingerprinting" is absolutely true; only the word "suspicious" is untrue because now we know what it's for.

throwaway290 4y ago
Fingerprinting requires there to be a purpose of identifying an individual device, and is done by collecting multiple data points that in aggregate are a unique combination. Just knowing you have a font or TeamViewer, like just knowing your IP or viewport size, isn't fingerprinting your device.
- dymk 4y ago
  They may not be baking a cake, but they have all the ingredients to bake a cake. They also give everybody else who is currently baking a cake an additional ingredient.
  - kaetemi 4y ago
    And according to the Internet, everything is cake.
    - merely-unlikely 4y ago
      the cake is a lie
  - EGreg 4y ago
    That’s why this attempt to stay anonymous — or even more ambitiously, prevent metadata from being aggregated to reveal mass patterns among many users - is useless. Eventually, everything will be collected using an actual use case — contacts, photos etc. — and the AI will process it and make deepfakes of anything. We won’t be able to trust any video evidence. The future is about watermarking and signing stuff using your own private keys. And even then, someone can just announce their private keys somewhere and have plausible deniability after that. Too many such renunciations though would be suspicious. The world is going to be as unfamiliar to us, breaking enough of our assumptions, as when people didn’t know about gramophones and televisions and instant communication, assuming that it would take time for a messenger to get a message out. Today we expect a ton of info to flow over always-on connections. Similarly our assumptions about identity and privacy and democracy are going to be totally smashed by AI and bots soon. Swarms of bots using GPT-4 and deepfakes will be able to drown out the vanishingly tiny amount of information that all the humans writing online produce, and adversarial networks will make them far more effective at convincing a crowd of humans thay X event happened or to support Y policy, or even rewrite history and science. The sams way that AlphaZero defeated AlphaGo which defeated human players, because it had far more combinations than all humanity combined did, and then downloaded the learnings to each node (Leela and others do the same). All that is missing is decentralized swarms of bots, that have no single point of failure, and can update their weights autonomously. I will go even further and say that CAPTCHAs will become irrelevant. Humans won’t be the primary economic actor for online services, because botnets will control far more capital and everyone will do some work for a botnet, such as being a caretaker etc. No one will even know or care who is giving the assignment or writing to them anymore. The sad part about this is that botnets based on GPT3 and deepfakes are simply bullshittes that don’t understand things like Cyc — they literally throw bullshit at a wall and see what sticks. It’s sad but this will collectively outperform collective human reasoning at convincing humans because ALL our systems are vulnerable to be subverted that way.
    - sofan 4y ago
      I'd rather we try for change than stagnate in the current state of the world. Have a little faith in humanity.
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    You don't get to call a thing something it isn't simply because you don't like that thing. The action of taking your fingerprint to identify you is fingerprinting. Providing you a handrail without a purpose of identifying you, even though it happens to take your fingerprint for anyone else, is not fingerprinting. Changing your fingerprint is not fingerprinting. This is an abuse of a technology with more harm then benefit if you ask me. Calling it "fingerprinting" is still a category error.
    - dymk 4y ago
      Changing something about the device so you can identify that device (or set of devices) later on is literally electronic fingerprinting.
      - hayalci 4y ago
        Repeatedly claiming something doesn't make it true. Here's what the Electronic Frontier Foundation says about fingerprinting. """Digital fingerprinting is the process where a remote site or service gathers little bits of information about a user's machine, and puts those pieces together to form a unique picture, or "fingerprint," of the user's device""" From: https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/what-fingerprinting https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/what-fingerprinting Here what TeamViewer is doing isn't fingerprinting. it's not combining unrealated bits of information to uniquely identify a user/computer. it's looking at literally one bit of information to identify whether the current non-uniquely-known user is in a -large- group or not, the group of "computers with teamviewer installed". it can be claimed that this is adding to the bits that can improve a third party's ability to uniquely identify a user/computer, but that's a different claim, that's not what teamviewer is doing.
- cyanydeez 4y ago
  Any unique data point can be used in building a finger print. The forest for the tree here
- cyanydeez 4y ago
  It identifies who has teams and who doesn't. Headline says "fingerprinting" If it's public information exposed through a browser and uniquely provides a bit of info, it's good for fingerprinting. End of line.
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    > It identifies who has teams and who doesn't. Which is not fingerprinting. > Headline says "fingerprinting" Which is obvious clickbait. Learn the terms.
    - cyanydeez 4y ago
      You don't understand how fingerprinting works, both LItTerAllY and for browsers.
hnbad 4y ago
It's less of a fingerprint and more of a shibboleth[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth

jonatron 4y ago

A side effect is that it allows anyone running a website to build a database of TeamViewer installs behind IP addresses. If there was a TeamViewer security issue, that database could be useful.

ST2084 4y ago
This was my first reaction.
collinmanderson 4y ago
Yes, this key point is missing from the rest of the discussion. _Any_ website can tell whether or not you have TeamViewer installed. Ad networks could theoretically target you based on whether or not you have TeamViewer installed. I’m not assuming malice, but it’s a much bigger privacy hole than just increasing fingerprinting by a few bits.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

stuckinhell 4y ago

They days of not assuming malice are long past. We have many documented cases of malice from corporations and world governments. We must assume malice and push back on the invasion of our rights.

mwcampbell 4y ago
The fact that some corporations and governments are guilty doesn't mean they all are. And the fact that they're guilty of some things doesn't mean we should assume they're guilty of others. It's no different than with people; corporations and governments are made of people, after all. Besides, the constant negativity is just exhausting for all involved. I'm glad intellectual curiosity won out on this thread, at least for now.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  That's true, but as soon as you allow something, you're probably allowing it for all time for all future governments.

vel0city 4y ago

Its technically more than one bit, as it has a different version of the font for each major version of Teamviewer. So there are several different fonts Teamviewer may have installed depending on when you installed it.

jacquesm 4y ago

1 bit is pretty good when you only need 33 (soon 34).

TehCorwiz 4y ago

It's more than that. The font encodes the version of Zoom that is installed.

neodypsis 4y ago

What can a user do to protect him/herself against malicious fingerprinting using web fonts?

midislack 4y ago

In todays world, ALWAYS assume malice.

mwcampbell 4y ago
The world is, to some extent, what we make it. If we're going to make it better, we can't give up so completely; we have to have hope that the world can be made better, and that we're not alone in trying to do so. That's why I choose to assume that the TeamViewer developers are merely trying to make the best of the constraints they're working in, i.e. no proper way for a website to determine whether the custom protocol handler is already installed. In their situation, I would probably be forced to do the same thing, and I wouldn't appreciate such negativity. I assume you wouldn't either.
- midislack 4y ago
  In short "bend over, we're coming in, but SMILE while we do" eh? This isn't working any more. You did this.

norwalkbear 4y ago

I wouldn't assume malice if this was a small startup of 4-5 Richard Stallmans or maybe 20 years ago. In this case, I think it IS malice. The font encodes way more data that you'd expect. Assuming malice from corporations should be the default in today's society.

Agamus 4y ago
Precisely my thoughts, though I think this is more problematic than simple, nefarious malice. Sometimes it is the case that no one behind the decisions is being malicious - e.g., perhaps just trying to accomplish a task at hand on a tight timeline. As such, the default in today's society, where we are more or less 'on our own' on this issue, should be to assume that even while that vehicle over there is indeed about to plow into the crowd, there is often no one behind the wheel. We should default to an even more suspicious approach.

takeda 4y ago

> This does add an extra bit to web-fingerprinting, it's only 1 bit. Every single bit doubles the value so 1 bit could still be a lot.