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.
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.
