Comment by triceratops
2 months ago
It's not a naive question. This comment says it's not possible to do that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905213
2 months ago
It's not a naive question. This comment says it's not possible to do that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905213
Oh, it's (re)randomised upon each restart, whew, thanks for the heads up
edit: er, I think that that also suggests that I need to restart firefox more often...
The webpage would have to scan the entire UUID space to create this fingerprint, which seems unlikely.
Just have a database of UUIDs. Seems pretty trivial to generate and sort as it's only 16 bytes each.
20 replies →
I don't think that's the case. I have the Earth View extension installed which shows a random google earth image.
I have this set as my homepage in Firefox as moz-extension://<extension-id>/index.html, and this has not changed since installing the extension. The page still works.
Doing it on restart makes the mitigation de facto useless. How often do you have 10, 20, 30d (or even longer) desktop uptime these days? And no one is regularly restarting their core applications when their desktop is still up.
Enjoy the fingerprinting.
I restart my browser basically every day.
1 reply →
There isn't enough energy in the solar system to count to 2^128. Now a uuid v4 number "only" has 2^122 bits of entropy. Regardless, you cannot realistically scan the uuid domain. It's not even a matter of Moore's law, it is a limitation of physics that will stand until computers are no longer made of matter.
You just need to open so many instances and tabs in each instance that it crashes every couple days
Umm, I restart my PC about once a week for security and driver updates.
If you don't, you have a lot more to worry about beyond fingerprinting...
Oh and I'm on LINUX (CachyOS) mind you.