Posted by mdp 6 hours ago
This works by looking for web accessible resources that are provided by the extensions. For Chrome, these are are available in a webpage via the URL chrome-extension://[PACKAGE ID]/[PATH] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/manif...
On Firefox, web accessible resources are available at "moz-extension://<extension-UUID>/myfile.png" <extension-UUID> is not your extension's ID. This ID is randomly generated for every browser instance. This prevents websites from fingerprinting a browser by examining the extensions it has installed. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
Doesn't the idea of swapping extension specific IDs to your browser specific extension IDs mean that instead of your browser being identifiable, you become identifiable?
I mean, it goes from "Oh they have X, Y , and Z installed" to "Oh, it's jim bob, only he has that unique set of IDs for extensions"
edit: er, I think that that also suggests that I need to restart firefox more often...
Once you deliver that, you can also think about a database of natural numbers!
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("")
);
}
Enjoy the fingerprinting.
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.
If you don't, you have a lot more to worry about beyond fingerprinting...
Oh and I'm on LINUX (CachyOS) mind you.
I presume the extension knows when it wants to access resources of its own. But random javascript, doesn't.
It won't disclose how, as it says it has had several users report it. And that it expects 50% of the bounty, and will use it for GPU upgrades.
* if LinkedIn didn't get it from an existing data source
LinkedIn's fingerprinting code, as the README explains, is found in fingerprint.js[2], which embeds a big JSON literal with the IDs of the extensions it probes for. (Sickeningly enough, this data starts about two-thirds of the way through the file* and isn't the culprit behind the bulk of its 2.15 MB size…)
* On line 34394; the one starting:
const r = [{
id: "aacbpggdjcblgnmgjgpkpddliddineni",
file: "sidebar.html"
2. <https://github.com/mdp/linkedin-extension-fingerprinting/blo...>
If anyone has evidence of constant tracking and reporting then please share it.
You cannot function without these enterprises, but that doesn't mean they're ideal or even ethical.
Microsoft wins because of network effects. It's impossible to compete. So I think it should be allowed to assail their monopoly here by any means. It's maximally fair for consumers and for free markets.
Ideally capitalism remains cutthroat and impossible to grow into undislodgeable titans.
Even more ideally, this would become a distributed protocol rather than a privately owned and guarded database.
They could stop all the scraping by providing a downloadable data bundle like Wikipedia.
I "scrape" linkedin in a roundabout way for personal use, and really what Ive found is that i should just maybee not bother at all. I can't get through the noise even when im applying at places that heavily match my skillset, and just get automated rejection emails.
The data bundle doesn't help that at all.
So, reasonable people may disagree. This is a fine place to mention it .. what if individual profiles built at LinkedIn are being combined with illegitimate and even directly illegal surveillance data and sold daily? Everyone stand up and salute when LinkedIn walks in the room? there has to be legal and direct ways to deal with change, and enforcement to complete an orderly and predictable economic marketplace.
This is a popular position across the aisle. Here's hoping the next guy can't be bought, or at least asks for more than a $400M tacky gold ballroom!
The recruiters all had LinkedIn paid accounts, and could access all of this data on the web. We made a browser extension so they wouldn’t need to do any manual data entry. Recruiters loved the extension because it saved them time.
I think it was a legitimate use. We were making LinkedIn more useful to some of their actual customers (recruiters) by adding a somewhat cursed api integration via a chrome extension. Forcing recruiters to copy and paste did’t help anyone. Our extension only grabbed content on the page the recruiter had open. It was purely read only and scoped by the user.
So when pay the highest scraper, it’s ok! Same data, different manner.
* Overriding scroll speed on Firefox Web. Not sure why.
* Opening a profile on mobile web, then pressing back to go to last page, takes me to the LinkedIn homepage everytime.
* One of their analytic URLs is a randomly generated path on www.linkedin.com, supposedly to make it harder to block. Regex rules on ublock origin sufficiently stop this.
Anyone know why they could be doing this?
Google became a monopoly. All monopolies do this.
I did have a relatively early beef with Chrome though, whcih was I couldn't completely opt out of Flash. As in, I didn't even want it installed. This turned out to be an issue because Flash turned out to be one of the earliest vectors for so-called "zombie cookies".
Fingerprinting in general has been a longstanding problem and has become more and more advanced.
Add to this that Google is, first and foremost, an advertising business and they've become increasingly hostile to ad-bloccking tech for obvious reasons.
Basically what I'm getting at is something I couldn't have imagined a decade ago where I think I really have go switch away from Chrome to something that takes privacy and security seriously so that LinkedIn can't do things like this. And I increasingly don't trust Google to do that.
I actually have more trust in Apple because they have historically been user-focused eg blocking Meta's third party cookies. But obviously Safari isn't an option because it's not cross-platform.
I'm not sure I trust the current state of Mozilla. What's the alternative? Brave? Is Opera still a thing? I honestly don't know.
What I really want is a cross-platform browser written in Rust that black-holes ads out of the box. Why Rust? Memory safety. I simply don't trust a large C/C++ code to never have buffer overruns. Memory safety has become too important.
I don't want my browser to provide information on what extensions I'm using to a site and that shouldn't be a thing I have to ask for or turn on in any way.
Screenshots found here https://x.com/DenisGobo/status/2018334684879438150
https://javascript.plainenglish.io/the-extensions-you-use-ar...
https://blog.castle.io/detecting-browser-extensions-for-bot-...
The big one that comes to mind is "Contact Out" which is scan-able, but LinkedIn seems to pretend like it doesn't exist? Smells like a deal happened behind the scenes...
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/email-finder-by-con...
https://www.nymeria.io/blog/linkedins-war-on-email-finder-ex...