Comments on: Is your browser telling on you?

By: Niels Brinch

Niels Brinch — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:55:30 +0000

You write: "Disabling Java or Flash is another option, however with a majority of websites using either Java or Flash this can be difficult and annoying."

I don't agree with this statement. A majority of websites does not use either Java or Flash. A small amount of websites still use Flash and it becomes less every day.

And for Java, besides internet banking etc., there is not much justification to use it anywhere, which is one of the reasons why it isn't widely used any longer.

By: Petah

Petah — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 07:17:24 +0000

If you enable the ping service, I can in most cases track you down to a city. And in the best cases even a suburb.

By: Tom Wijsman

Tom Wijsman — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 15:26:41 +0000

Java should not be installed, you don't need it for day-to-day browsing; it's full of security leaks (yes, two big ones last month) and is often more an actual risk to the user than it is useful. I've seen a lot of Blackhole exploited computers the last month...

Flash is making its room for HTML5, although it'll still take a while before we finally progress to that next stage, but Flash is overall somewhat more secure and I believe it can determine much less than Java can.

Bottom line: Get rid of Java! Without Java and accepting warnings for other plug-ins you for example can't determine the internal IP. Let's wait a bit longer for the time we can get rid of Adobe PDF and Flash as well...

By: journeymangeek

journeymangeek — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 10:09:49 +0000

If you want some really scary stuff take a look at panopticlick https://panopticlick.eff.org/ – its just browser fingerprinting and gets enough information to (allegedly?) identify my system uniquely.

By: mvark

mvark — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 08:58:37 +0000

It is also possible for a site to know if you are logged into Gmail, Twitter and Facebook in one of the open tabs of your browser – http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/02/an-interesting-way-to-determine-if-you-are-logged-into-social-web-sites/

I use the Google Mobilizer service through a bookmarklet when accessing less popular/suspicious looking websites – http://mvark.blogspot.com/2012/04/google-mobilizer-bookmarklet-view-just.html