Thanks for all the insightful comments about how this "didn't work for you" or "I'm paranoid so I survived this"?
It works. It works enough of the time and on enough browsers to be very relevant to anyone who cares about the privacy/security of internet users at large.
This is an impressive proof of concept, and an important thing to be discussing, yeah?
[EDIT] To clarify, I tested this on Firefox 8.0.1 on my 2011 iMac with Lion and it worked flawlessly one by one as I visited the sites "Facebook, Reddit, Flickr", they turned from gray to green in each subsequent test.
I don't know if it's accurate enough to be a concern. What could an attacker do with such information that is so scary? They could publish "IP address X has been to Y, Z, and W recently", or they could use it to target ads, I guess, but it doesn't seem like it's reliable enough to cause any serious harm. You could just say, "Um, no I haven't" if it becomes an issue.
It did correctly detect some sites for me, but it gave one false positive and three false negatives. With that kind of error rate I just don't see it being taken seriously in anything that matters.
Read the rest of the comments here. Everyone else is having similar problems. Also, please spare me the expected "This is all anecdotal/sample size of 30" follow-up. Perhaps you can answer the real question -- is this valuable to anyone if it has a significant error margin? I think it wouldn't be allowed a margin of more than 1% if it were to be useful, and even that is kind of pushing it if you intend to do anything important with the data -- if 20 sites are tested per visitor, a 1% error rate would mean that an incorrect detection would occur every fifth visitor or so. That's enough to allow plausible deniability in my book.
FWIW, I added several improvements, and according to the built-in survey, it works for about 95% of all visitors. If you had bad results initially, clear you cache and give it a second try.
Exactly. Its a matter of spending a few hours per browser to perfect it. For all we know, someone may already have perfected it and could be using this in the wild.
"But autism researchers Christopher Jarrold and David Routh at the University of Bristol, UK, pointed out that Baron-Cohen reported the analysis of data only for engineers, not for the other occupations surveyed. After analysing the same data, they found that fathers of children with autism were more likely to work in medicine, science and accountancy, as well as engineering, and less likely to have manual occupations. They suggested that these fathers were simply more likely to have reached a higher level of education."
And the effort is probably hopeless, but maybe it will at least draw some attention to facebook's abhorrent practices. But they get plenty of negative press already, doesn't seem to slow them down.
I figure it's going to take a lot more efforts like this, to stop the abuses when portals gain monopoly power on user's attention.
User's will put up with it, (and probably put up with much worse), there is no alternative to facebook for what facebook does and is. Chickens and eggs ...
I really like the "will work on interesting projects" idea, I feel the same way generally myself.
Kind of surprised there's so much "do something besides this" feedback in the comments here, I can't see why this isn't an awesome way to find projects?
There's some amazing ideas out there that people have, why not tap into that gigantic resource pool a little deeper, eh?
Yeah, Joel is dead on for how to learn to program. Unfortunately, I think we need to question that question more.
What folks are often asking when they ask "how do I program?" is something entirely different.
How do I learn how to make a website? Use wordpress or yola or squarespace.
How do I learn how to make that website look better? Read design blogs, some starter tutorials on html and css and start diving into the CSS. It's not that hard a standalone thing to learn.
How do I learn how to make that website do something fancy like fade things out? Start diving into the javascript in the same way.
How do I learn how to make that website do something functional like send an email, or save a session? Pick a modern framework (Ruby on Rails, Node on Express), read/watch the starter tutorials on it, and dive in.
How do I learn how to make that website do something functional and NOT have it be a horrendous hack job? Time to start reading those programming books :D
Just sayin' it's not always step 1. Depends on what you need to get done, and what you really want to learn how to do. Yeah?
I think it's hilarious that most of the comments I'm seeing here so far seem to be doing the exact over analysis that this article is trying to dissuade us over-analytical types from doing ... maybe?
What I find hilarious is the idea that things can "just" be built (motherfuckas), rather than things built through lots of hard work, dedication, and yes even that apparently dirty word analysis.
What this article is suggesting sounds great for prototypes, which is what startups should be doing early on, but not forever.
It works. It works enough of the time and on enough browsers to be very relevant to anyone who cares about the privacy/security of internet users at large.
This is an impressive proof of concept, and an important thing to be discussing, yeah?
[EDIT] To clarify, I tested this on Firefox 8.0.1 on my 2011 iMac with Lion and it worked flawlessly one by one as I visited the sites "Facebook, Reddit, Flickr", they turned from gray to green in each subsequent test.