this post was submitted on 08 May 2026
439 points (92.6% liked)

Technology

84796 readers
4062 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] ProfessorScience@lemmy.world 176 points 1 week ago (8 children)

They're really playing up the ominous tone.

"We know this because your IP address — xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx — was the first thing your device sent us. We know the rest of it. We chose not to display it. Most pages would not have made that choice. We did not ask for your location. Your address arrived before you did."

Uh, yeah. That's how IP addresses work.

[–] Nima@leminal.space 101 points 1 week ago

dude be careful, right now your house is probably broadcasting a street address.

the mailman that drops your mail off? he knows

[–] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 54 points 1 week ago

We sent a SYN-ACK packet and YOU acknowledged it, confirming you are not spoofing YOUR IP address. Now WE share the same sequence number. Most sites do not tell you this is happening.

[–] XLE@piefed.social 28 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Compare this to Google's homepage, which is clean, wholesome, friendly, and inviting.

(I don't mind sites that try to scare the user straight, but this one definitely has the unmistakable tinge of AI-generated wording. Make a sense if you click through the links at the bottom to see who created it.)

[–] morto@piefed.social 19 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It really looks ai-generated. It even contains mistakes like saying that my 5yo phone model with low resolution is a high end device. All the text is pretty "generic" and sloppy

[–] iamthetot@piefed.ca 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Tbh, a five year old phone can absolutely be high end. Mine is four years old and I absolutely consider it high end.

[–] morto@piefed.social 5 points 1 week ago

A 5yo phone can absolutely be high end, but definitely not mine lol. It got a cheap soc, low resolution and 2gb of ram

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] MisterCurtis@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, a bit overly ominous. But my mom doesn't know that's how IP addresses work. And if it scares a bit more privacy mindedness into her, good.

[–] Dojan@pawb.social 8 points 1 week ago

I think this is the idea behind it. Sure it looks sanctimonious if you're already privacy-minded, but then the site isn't for you.

[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 11 points 1 week ago

Yes. You can either give them your real one, or not. That's the point being made. Actually the point of the whole page is that just loading a website tells a huge amount about you, even if you are behind a vpn and extensions to minimize your fingerprint. You are a product for sale.

[–] lauha@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Language and dark mode setting are also funny. Yes, I literally want to share those preferences so you don't serve me a blinding white website in hebrew. What a hacker you are.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] saimen@feddit.org 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I am pretty sure 90% of the people using the Internet don't know what an IP address is.

[–] testaccount789@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Obvious, the address of where you pee.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 week ago

Well yes, but most people don't even know that part. I guess it's not the worst thing to tell them?

[–] Tippy@sh.itjust.works 58 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Laughing my ass off reading through this. The sanctimonious and passive aggressive threatening tone is perfect for how much info it got wrong just because I use Firefox and an adblock. YOUR BROWSER DIDN'T TELL US ANYTHING ABOUT THIS, LIKELY BECAUSE ITS FIREFOX. BUT THAT MEANS WE KNOW YOU USE FIREFOX AND WE ARE CHOOSING TO BE SAFE WITH THAT INFO, YOURE WELCOME, PWNED!!!11!1111!1

Teaching people about fingerprinting and how important understanding it is for personal privacy is good, but acting like a 4chan script kiddy group and making bizarre empty threats like you're mr robot ain't it, dawg.

From other comments this is likely some AI slop to sell a product, but if they're serious they come off like they just slept through sec+ and think they're shadow brokers now lmao

[–] paris@lemmy.blahaj.zone 30 points 1 week ago (1 children)

On a bog standard phone with dns blocking and nothing more, it was able to identify a lot of information. Some pieces of information I didn't realize are sent to websites when I visit them. It's a good demonstration of fingerprinting.

[–] Tippy@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Using a slightly less popular browser with a single privacy addon almost completely circumvented their fingerprinting. Changing the user agent to mask the few pieces of almost useless info it did get, would have totally circumvented their fingerprinting.

I understand the average user would have more correct indicators. The point is, if they're going to run a service like this, pretending to be hackers and making entirely toothless threats to scare people with info they likely don't even know how to interpret themselves, shows how incompetent they are and that they don't actually want to educate. Hence why most legit groups that do education like this choose to present themselves as professionals and adults instead.

[–] FG_3479@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (4 children)

You should try fingerprint.com .That is what Dropbox, Booking.com, TikTok etc use and you need Firefox with Jshelter set to the following settings to defeat it.

  • Time precision: High
  • Locally rendered images: Little lies
  • Locally generated audio: Little lies
  • WebAssembly speed-up: Enabled
  • Everything else including Fingerprint Detector disabled
[–] Tippy@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 week ago

I'm not saying I'm a sec expert and impervious to tracking. I don't need to try multiple sites until one gives me more correct hits, I understand the basics of fingerprinting and how it can be used maliciously. I do more than the average user to safeguard my information.

My point is, real sec professionals attempting to educate and make the general public more knowledgeable about privacy don't have to rely on scare tactics and vague implications that they live in the matrix and are coming for you to accomplish that. It makes them look like ding-dongs who need to take the trenchcoats and sunglasses off and open the blinds. This thankfully seems to be a common sentiment in this thread.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] spizzat2@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Similar results with NoScript.

This volume requires JavaScript. That is part of the point — your browser is what is being read.

With JavaScript off, the page cannot tell you what your browser disclosed. The data is still there. The disclosure still happened. Only the telling of it stops.

The fact that they're stopped from "the telling" says a lot about their abilities, but not much about "the disclosure".

I imagine it was just stuff collected in most server logs: IP Address, user agent string... I'm not too concerned, really.

Looks like they don't have a dedicated backend dev. A similar presentation could be done by making it a dynamically generated page, with some CSS animations.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 week ago

Even bog standard ios hides some stuff they claim to have.

WHAT RENDERS YOUR WORLD

Apple GPU

Your graphics processor identified itself as Apple GPU. This tells us the manufacturer, the generation, and roughly the price of your machine. Combined with your screen size and font list, this string alone can distinguish your device from most others on the internet. The technique is called WebGL fingerprinting. No permission is required.

Uh sure, that string tells you the generation and price.

[–] RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world 50 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Didn't realize my phone sent it's rotation data without promoting, everything else is kind of needed to send me info.

My IP

My screen size

My interactions with the page

[–] degenerate_neutron_matter@fedia.io 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, the rotation was a bit of a surprise to me. Doesn't seem like Waterfox has a setting to disable that, so I just disabled my browser's access to the accelerometer and gyros entirely.

[–] db2@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago

Now instead of cutting it off send fake data so it looks like your phone is in a blender.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 47 points 1 week ago

Doesn't seem to be anything new here than what's we already know:

Just with a more ominous tone. Is it any wonder people are afraid of technology?

[–] new_world_odor@lemmy.world 26 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

This is lame as shit. The tone of the writing is going to get non-tech people feeling quite dismissive, or scared enough to seek out surface level info, which just rolls back into feeling dismissive. It's actually really stupid because they're clearly driving fear, but hardly touch the real thing to be scared of. Fingerprinting is barely mentioned, it's only really addressed once, in the font identification section. The issue with all these data points is how they can be collected and correlated across the web - it basically means fuck-all if it's only from one page.

edit: On top of that, each data point is presented as some sort of horrible catastrophe, when some are completely benign. Barely addressing why some points actually matter, or not at all. (Like click/touch data, it's needed for site functionality, but it gets creepy when that data is used for things like psychological profiling)

Even more disappointing because the formatting/appearance is more than clean enough to share with basically anyone. Yet the tone and focus makes that out of the question. What a waste of time to make this.

[–] brsrklf@jlai.lu 26 points 1 week ago

Your graphics processor identified itself as or similar.

Ah yes, Or similar, great GPU, love it.

[–] LeapSecond@lemmy.zip 24 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Your finger moved 273 times. You tapped 14 times.

I'm sorry what?

Since they went into the effort to make this sound so ominous, it'd be cool to see some actual inferences from the data points. For example it would be pretty easy to tell you are behind a VPN and your real location is probably xyz.

[–] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

They knew i was on a vpn and the time zone, your phone just gives that shit up

Dont even get me started on "experimental" browser flags that come default on some browsers

[–] rozodru@piefed.world 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

sooooo reading a browsers user-agent is now a thing to worry about? oh look I changed my user-agent and now this dumb ass site is giving all the wrong info woulda look at that.

"We know where you are based on your IP" yeah bro, that's how IP's work. look i turned on mullvad, omg now it says i'm in Sweden!

"we know you're using an AMD gpu" gasp ya don't say. oh look I changed my user-agent again and now you think I'm on nvidia, crazy how that works huh?

This is a dumb bullshit site.

oh look it's built by these morons: https://riseuplabs.app/ a company that vibe codes every "product" they have. so naturally building a stupid site that just pulls your user-agent would seem amazing to them.

This is bullshit marketing for their bullshit vibe coding. report this post, it's an ad.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] wampus@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Heheh, a whole lot of mocking in this thread, but I don't mind the site / its display.

Yeah, it's overly melodramatic in its setup, and a bunch of the information doomerism is silly in terms of the info basically being required to provide data comms etc. It also tends to get things a bit wrong in a few categories -- like for me, it said I was in a totally different city (still the right country at least - Canada), then it said my time zone was in iceland, which is kinda... no.

But the general message of the site, and the awareness its trying to raise in regards to how much data gets shared for basic comms establishment, and how that information gets used to fingerprint people, is worthwhile.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] CarterH739@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago (5 children)

The location is off by about fifty miles. It didn't get my GPU or battery level. Everything else is stuff that doesn't matter. Firefox browser, English, android device. I am not terribly impressed.

[–] Brewchin@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You're right, and same for me, but what if you'd never considered any of this before and are new to the idea of privacy? I expect it would then give you pause for thought.

Sure, it's a gimmick site. But it serves a useful purpose for those who don't know about the topic. Which is probably the majority of users.

Despite my own experience: TIL the tilt angle of my phone is available to websites.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] Watermark710@piefed.social 14 points 1 week ago (11 children)

It got my location wrong. It got my GPU wrong. It said I never left the tab, even though I left it to start this comment. It said I moved my cursor 111 times in 74 seconds, which is absolutely false.

That site is just pointless. Pretty much the only things it got right were my time zone and my browser.

load more comments (11 replies)
[–] pageflight@piefed.social 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Seems to be making a lot out of "you send your user agent and screen resolution".

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

There is a looot more than that lol. Usually enough to allow them to uniquely fingerprint every device on earth.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Blackfeathr@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

Lol it says I have a "recent, high end device"... It's a Samsung that's old enough to be in the third grade.

Only thing that's missing is a bunch of threats with a Bitcoin address at the bottom.

[–] dirthawker0@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Time zone has no info about where I actually am. Sure, I'm in a particular vertical slice of the earth. I have the JP keyboard downloaded, but you're wrong, that doesn't mean I speak Japanese. In fact, I speak French but your cookie reading didn't pick that up.

It is genuinely interesting what info gets passed to websites but the doomy tone is rather silly and will unnecessarily worry people who don't know much about computers/Internet, which is the majority of users.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] unglueclass23@programming.dev 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Your browser accepts cookies. Websites can write small files to your device that persist after you leave — files that identify you when you return, that follow you across sites, that remember what you looked at, what you almost bought, and how long you hesitated. We have not written one. Your browser would let this page write up to 10 GB to your device — a private room, ours alone, like the one given to every site you visit.

Hol up ... 10 GB?

[–] CannedYeet@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

I think that refers to localStorage not cookies.

[–] CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 week ago

Very useful site. Thanks for posting this.

There are multiple sites like this, for example clickclickclick.click has been around for 10 years (not optimized for mobile)

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We know your full name, blood type, and that your left elbow is itching a bit right now. Your browser told us. But we're choosing to not show you. We also know what you did on July 14, 2018.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] samus12345@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I opened it in Firefox and Librewolf just to see how the information sent was different. Librewolf obfuscated the following which Firefox disclosed:

Time zone

Monitor resolution

GPU used

Also, the Firefox one said I moved my cursor such-and-such times, while the Librewolf one said my finger moved such-and-such times. Must be related to hiding what screen I'm using. I'm on desktop.

[–] Zetta@mander.xyz 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Firefox on mobile obscured GPU.

"Your browser masked your graphics processor. Firefox and Safari have started returning generic strings — "Mozilla", "Apple", "or similar" — instead of the real renderer. The fact that yours did so tells us, with reasonable confidence, which browser you are running. The mask is also a fingerprint."

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›