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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

TIL the CPU count is exposed to JS. I guess that's fine? It feels nasty, but it's not really worse than all the other fingerprinting data we expose...

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Also fonts you have installed, the type of connection you're using, GPU parameters, keyboard languages on your system and so much more [1]

[1] https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/

It’s also frequently wrong when running in Docker. Some of that is libuv’s fault, some of it is cgroups deciding not to mask off /proc values that are wrong in the cgroup.

I might be wrong but I think I heard that Firefox and maybe Safari bin that to a couple common values. (Or maybe that's just in the tracking-prevention mode that Tor uses?)

According to MDN Safari clamps it to 4 or 8, but Firefox does not: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/h...

I always found it annoying that CPU information was widely available and precise while memory information was not - it's clamped to 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, 4 or 8 GB. If you're running something memory-bound in the browser you have to be really conservative to avoid locking up the user's device (or ask them to manually specify how much memory to use). https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Device_Memo...

I was thinking of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1984333. Looks like that's only active when certain fingerprinting protection settings are on.

I think one of the third party user.js projects does that.

Maybe https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

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