Items tagged privacy in 2018
Filters: Year: 2018 × privacy × Sorted by date
Using achievement stats to estimate sales on steam (via) Really interesting data leak exploit here: Valve’s Steam API was showing the percentage of users that gained a specific achievement up to 16 decimal places—which inadvertently leaked their exact usage statistics, since if 0.012782207690179348 percent of players get an achievement the only possible input is 8 players out of 62,587. # 9th August 2018, 9:03 am
Cookies-over-HTTP Bad (via) Mike West from the Chrome security team proposes a way for browsers to start discouraging the use of tracking cookies sent over HTTP—which represent a significant threat to user privacy from network attackers. It’s a clever piece of thinking: browsers would slowly ramp up the forced expiry deadline for non-HTTPS cookies, further encouraging sites to switch to HTTPS cookies while giving them ample time to adapt. # 7th April 2018, 2:39 pm
Protecting Against HSTS Abuse (via) Any web feature that can be used to persist information will eventually be used to build super-cookies. In this case it’s HSTS—a web feature that allows sites to tell browsers “in the future always load this domain over HTTPS even if the request specified HTTP”. The WebKit team caught this being exploited in the wild, by encoding a user identifier in binary across 32 separate sub domains. They have a couple of mitigations in place now—I expect other browser vendors will follow suit. # 19th March 2018, 10:21 pm
What we need to do is come up with a way to help people understand that there are ways to never be lost again, and to listen to any music you want, and to video chat with someone on the other side of the world, without them having to feel disquieted about it. That it’s not OK that you’re made to feel weirded out. That it’s possible for there to be alternatives. That having to feel someone rooting around in your life is not a price you should have to pay.
— Stuart Langridge # 1st February 2018, 2:03 pm