Casey's Tumblelog

I'm just a regular schmo, in his late 20s, living on the east coast of the US.

Here you'll find random findings from around the Internet, with a few original items sprinkled in.

If you'd like, you can read about my journey into buying a Mac.

I am also embarking on a project to take one picture a day (or so) until I hit 365.

I can be contacted via e-mail via the username casey at this domain.
Fri May 30

SocialHistory.js

marco:

(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.

This is for the geeks.  As an engineer, I admire this for the creativity and relative simplicity.  As a person, I’m also a little uneasy at the privacy implications.  Very cool, nonetheless.

  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. brocatus reblogged this from marco and added:
    …but very clever en ingeniously lo-tek.
  8. wakeupbrandon reblogged this from pile
  9. abhilashr reblogged this from marco and added:
    Holy crap! So simple. Yet something that I’ve never thought of. Incredible!
  10. pile reblogged this from marco
  11. 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...
  12. craig reblogged this from marco
  13. pdl2h reblogged this from marco
  14. marco reblogged this from marc and added:
    Incredible. Now any website has a reliable way...detect whether you have recently visited...
  15. 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.
  16. saar reblogged this from soxiam and added:
    Nice!! :) soxiam:
  17. soxiam posted this
Posted at 5:44pm

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