A hot potato: As cookies become a less reliable way to track people online, AliExpress may be showing how far companies will go to fill that gap. Researchers found code on the site’s homepage that ran silent audio processes in the browser. Tied to Alibaba’s security systems, the scripts tap a device’s own audio hardware to generate a signal and measure the tiny, device-specific ways it comes back – producing something close to a fingerprint that doesn’t need a single cookie to work. It’s the kind of tracking a user would likely never notice.
The issue only surfaced after a developer had trouble using multipoint Bluetooth headphones while an AliExpress tab was open: the headphones wouldn’t switch properly from the computer to a phone. Once the tab was closed, the problem disappeared.
Digging into the site’s code, the developer found it was using the Web Audio API to build audio-processing graphs set to zero volume. The process produced no audible sound, but it still connected to the computer’s audio system, keeping the audio path active in the background, which appears to be what interfered with the headphones’ ability to switch devices.
This wasn’t the kind of audio activity tied to a normal media player. Because the processing graph ran at zero gain and connected directly to the system’s audio output, muting the browser tab did nothing to stop it: the browser kept processing the signal even though there was nothing to hear
Is that on chrome or Firefox? I thought Firefox disabled media by default. Mine always requires a click to allow media.
Edit: maybe I changed the settings
holy fuck i am tired. everytime i read something like this is think “what kind of things do we not know about”
Dafuq… Want a top super secret tipp? Snowden leaks… and wikileaks…
and it just jeeps getting worse from there
@cm0002@europe.pub
Dude that’s so gross!!! But I can imagine the engineer who thought it up feeling really good about themselves (while clever, they have betrayed their species).Engineers need a real code of ethics like 50 years ago
yawn It’s as if people are actually pretending that uXDT and other tracking methods are something new… TVs, cell phones, smart devices, IoT devices, etc.—of course, everything is affected… Back then, some tracking methods were mainly used to track offline devices far away from a network… The whole thing just kept evolving… The fact that people are now bringing this up in relation to Ali, even though it’s even more prevalent in Western products… Or advertising using ultrasonic sounds. (Hehe, or in stores…) And if you think about side-channel attacks now—for example, the characteristic sounds from hard drives, CPUs, etc.
And when you consider what came to light about these issues through Snowden and WikiLeaks.
Whether it’s the U.S. or Europe… both are steadily eroding democracy… But of course, you worry about what they’re tracking about you in China, not what your own countries are tracking about you—and how that could end really badly… Just think about it: if Hitler had had access to something like that—oh my…
