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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 Team

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.
      - EGreg 4y ago
        Change for change's sake? What do you have to gain from deepfakes etc? You really see a lot of benefits?
      - nullcontext 4y ago
        No. I posit humanity has never left a glass half full. Just wait for the deepfakes to utterly destroy video as a means of common representation of reality when it crosses the threshold of too often faked to be generally believed without independent attestation. And even then people will question subconsciously.
  - 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

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.
    - EGreg 4y ago
      Change for change's sake? What do you have to gain from deepfakes etc? You really see a lot of benefits?
    - nullcontext 4y ago
      No. I posit humanity has never left a glass half full. Just wait for the deepfakes to utterly destroy video as a means of common representation of reality when it crosses the threshold of too often faked to be generally believed without independent attestation. And even then people will question subconsciously.
- 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