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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty insane how much your browser knows about you:

http://webkay.robinlinus.com/

There's another one I can't find, but it writes out things like "user moved mouse to x,y. User has been idle for 10 seconds, page lost focus, page gained focus" .. kinda creepy how much is available to the Javascript engine.

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This is pretty normal for a UI programming framework. The creepy thing for me is when that stuff is reported back to the origin over a websocket.

You must be talking about clickclickclick.click

And thanks for the new novelty website bookmark :D

http://imgur.com/6ep0YnW

https://clickclickclick.click

Clickable link

Reminds me of “Achievement Unlocked”:

http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked

Elephant Games are incredible and their creator is also imcredible. I highly recommend checking out his other games if you haven't already. http://www.jmtb02.com/

Operating system, browser, CPU, local IP, connection speed. That's all I was shown, probably thanks to uMatrix blocking 3rd party scripts.

>Browser Plugins

>No plugins detected.

Interesting. I have 6 installed on Firefox.

Firefox no longer reports installed plugins to websites. It causes some interesting behavior on websites that check to see if you have flash before letting you play games (sorry, you need to have flash installed). I had a user script for a while that 'fixed' the navigator.$whatever to show having flash installed so I could play some game; now I just use Shumway and it seems to work.

If you think this stuff is creepy well...okay?

I mean, it's not like every desktop application you've ever used in your life couldn't do the same or more?

The difference is that you run only trusted native applications with the ability to check their source code, while you are visiting untrusted sites which often have obfuscated javascript.

I think that it would be a better comparison between a pdf file and the web: pdfs files can't do the same or more.

PDFs can run JavaScript too. Open this PDF in Chrome: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/osnr/horrifying-pdf-experi...

And I would argue it is harder for the average user to view the JavaScript inside PDFs: on the web just right click and choose Inspect Element right in the browser; for a PDF you'll have to use specialized tools to decode the myriad encoding schemes inside a PDF. The average JavaScript developer doesn't know how to extract JavaScript from a PDF.

While it works on Chromium it does not seem to work in xpdf, pdf.js nor any other pdf viewer that I tried. It seems that JS, flash, etc inside pdfs are proprietary, useless, and potentially dangerous adobe-only extensions that nobody else implements and nobody uses. It's just that Chromium happened to have a JS engine so they decided to let JS inside pdfs to be executed with a very constrained API (which can't do anything malicious probably - unless a bug is found in its JS engine).

My point still stands: I do not expect a pdf document to be able to do anything like the djsumdog's link and neither do most people. If a pdf document was able to do anything like that I would consider that viewer as broken.

> The average JavaScript developer doesn't know how to extract JavaScript from a PDF.

They could learn with a few google searches.

> you run only trusted native applications with the ability to check their source code

Is the "you" in this scenario Richard Stallman?

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