Here’s a new way to track visitors to your website, as noted in NewScientist (24 November 2018, paywall):
The tool works by measuring subtle but unique differences in the way the quartz crystal in a computer’s clock behaves compared with crystals in other computers. These differences affect how quickly websites are processed by a computer, so they act as a digital fingerprint for a device.
When 300 volunteers made a one-off visit to a website using the tool, it could uniquely fingerprint around half of them. When combined with other techniques that measure how a computer processes a web site’s graphics, 80 per cent of devices could be identified.
“Our technique is far more reliable and practical than any existing fingerprinting technique,” says Sanchez-Rola. His team presented the tool at the recent ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Toronto, Canada.
So now I suppose browsers are going to have to offer an option for varying how quickly they process websites.
This what I call goofy shit.
