Browser fingerprinting is yet another subtle way of spying on users. Every time your browser connects to a website, it offers up some helpful information about itself — like the timezone it’s in, your browser brand and version, plugins installed, screen size, system fonts used, etc.

This can be used to “fingerprint” your browser.

To check yours out, check this link out.

That will take you to Panopticlick, an Electronic Frontier Foundation website to test your browser.

Of the 4.6 million tested so far, my browser was unique:

That adds up to yet another way of tracking users on the web.

As the report detailing the technique says:

Browser fingerprinting is a powerful technique, and finngerprints must be considered alongside cookies, IP addresses and supercookies when we discuss web privacy and user trackability.

… browsers reveal so much version and configuration information that they remain overwhelmingly trackable. There are implications both for privacy policy and technical design.

 

20: “The box said ‘Requires Windows 8 or better’. So I installed Linux.”

19: “Artificial Intelligence often struggles against natural stupidity.”

18: “To err is human. To really foul up requires the root password.”

17: “If at first you don’t succeed, call it version 1.0”

16: “Programmers are tools for converting caffeine into code.”

15: “Yo moma is like HTML: tiny head, huge body.”

14: “Life would be much easier if we had the source code.”

13: “The problem with troubleshooting code is that sometimes trouble shoots back.”

12: “Someone knocked over my recycle bin. Now there are icons all over my desktop.”

11: “The great thing about Object Oriented code is that it can make small, simple problems look like large, complex ones.”

10: “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.”

9: “I’m not anti-social. I’m just not user friendly”

8: “I went to a gentleman’s cybercafe — and they offered me a laptop dance.”

7: “The internet: where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents.”

6: “There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”

5: “The difference between a virus and Microsoft Windows? Viruses rarely fail.”

4: “Hacking is like sex. You get in. You get out. And you hope you didn’t leave something that can be traced back to you.”

3: “If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.”

2: “My attitude isn’t bad. It’s in beta.”

1: “You know you’re a geek when… you try to shoo a fly away from the monitor with your cursor. That just happened to me. It was scary.”

 

What’s your favourite quote?

Apparently Facebook has ads. Who knew?

I didn’t, because I get no ads. Well, very few. That’s because I block ’em.

I’m sympathetic to the “Advertising pays our bills” argument. That’s why I don’t block them all. But I’m not sympathetic to the whizzing, whirring, animated ads you often find. How am I supposed to concentrate my attention on anything with that sort of shit going on? Of course, that’s their intention. THEY want your attention. They don’t get mine.

I’m even less sympathetic to ads with sound!

There are other reasons to block ads too.

• Pages load quicker. Who do you think pays for the bandwidth they use? You do!

• No third-parties looking over your shoulder. Most ads are placed by third-party sites you’ve never heard of and have no intention of visiting. So why let them into your browser?

Blocking ads is as simple as installing a browser extension. There’s a few of these around, but I use AdBlock on Chrome or Safari, and AdBlock Edge on Firefox.

(I used to use AdBlock Plus. Then they started white-listing sites and generally acting like a mini ad agency themselves. You can read about the controversy here.)

AdBlock and AdBlock Edge both work in a similar way. You get a little icon up beside your URL line.

 

 

 

Ads are blocked by default, but click on the icon for other options.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can easily unblock individual pages, or whole websites.

What difference does it make? Check it out …

Before:

After:

(Click pics to enlarge)

 

 

There’s little doubt the US patent system is badly broken. Last time I detailed how Amazon had recently patented a photographic technique that’s been in use for over a century. Here are some some more patent howlers from the past …

 

Apple patent the rectangle

November 2012

US patent D670,286 grants Apple patent on a rectangle with rounded corners.

The legend below the drawings for their ”Portable Display Device” patent says, ”The broken lines in the Figures show portions of the portable display device which form no part of the claimed design …” So essentially they’ve patented the rectangle.

Incidentally, this amazing technological breakthrough was the work of no less than 15 people, including the late Steve Jobs.

 

Microsoft patents email links

September 2011

US patent 8,028,032 ” …detects a link to a web-site in an email message [and] causes content from the web-site to be visualized on a common display area…”

How do they think of this stuff?

 

 

Jackie Lister patents the tree stump

October 1998

No, no, no! It’s a “Wildlife Feeding Device”.

 

Eugene Ross patents the stick

March 2002

If you can patent a tree stump, why not a stick? Sorry, it’s actually an “Animal Toy”.

“An apparatus for use as a toy by an animal, for example a dog, to either fetch, carry or chew …”

 

Dog Nose Art

July 2009

This patent contains no less than 17 detailed drawings of an invention “directed to providing a dog nose smudge laminate for people such as dog admirers who want a permanent reminder of a pet dog.”

 

Mouse device with a built-in printer

November 2003

I’d love to see the A3 version of this beauty!

 

Method of swinging on a swing

April 2002

Patent number US 6,368, 227 “…in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other.”

Stop that immediately kids. We haven’t a license for it!

 

McDonald’s tries to patent the sandwich

December 2005

It might have been around since 1762, but the Earl of Sandwich never thought to patent it. McDonald’s did. In a mere 55 pages. Including illustrations and flowcharts.

 

A patent to patent patent trolling

October 2008

Patent trolls make a business out of trying to extract license fees for obscure patents. Back in 2008, with no sense of irony, Halliburton tried to patent the idea.

Two years later, IBM tried to patent the same thing.