Comment by awesome_dude

6 hours ago

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.

    • That's actually a bright idea! Have you ever thought about applying for VC funds?

      Once you deliver that, you can also think about a database of natural numbers!

    • lol

      Let's go a step further and just iterate through them on the client. I plan on having this phone well past the heat death of the universe, so this is guaranteed to finish on my hardware.

        function* uuidIterator() {
         const bytes = new Uint8Array(16); 
         while (true) {
           yield formatUUID(bytes);
      
           let carry = 1;
           for (let i = 15; i >= 0 && carry; i--) {
             const sum = bytes[i] + carry;
             bytes[i] = sum & 0xff;
             carry = sum > 0xff ? 1 : 0;
           }
       
           if (carry) return;
         }
       }
       
       function formatUUID(b) {
         const hex = [...b].map(x => x.toString(16).padStart(2, "0"));
         return (
           hex.slice(0, 4).join("") + "-" +
           hex.slice(4, 6).join("") + "-" +
           hex.slice(6, 8).join("") + "-" +
           hex.slice(8, 10).join("") + "-" +
           hex.slice(10, 16).join("")
         );
       }
      

      This is free. Feel free to use it in production.

      2 replies →

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.

    • yeah I close out everything as a mental block against anything I'm working on.

      I think there's a subset of people that offload memory to their browsers and that's kinda scary given how these fingerprint things work.

  • 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.