History Sniffing: How YouPorn Checks What Other Porn Sites You’ve Visited

http://blogs.forbes.com/kashmirhill/2010/11/30/history-sniffing-how-youporn-checks-what-other-porn-sites-youve-visited-and-ad-networks-test-the-quality-of-their-data/

by _b8r0 • 16 years ago

37 17 16 years ago

blogs.forbes.com

BillGoatse• 16 years ago

The script on YouPorn’s site that checks a user’s history (which you can see for yourself by going to the site and checking out its html with 'View Source')

Did Forbes just tell me to go to YouPorn.com? :)

apl• 16 years ago

Why yes, it did. You seem a little prudish for someone who goes by the moniker of Mr Goatse.

ZoFreX• 16 years ago

Nothing new here, this is an old technique that already exploded a while back. The Mozilla team said they would be removing this "security hole", I don't know if they have yet.

What most reporting on it fails to cover is the nature of the "history sniffing". They cannot view your browser history. What they can do is query specific URLs against a black box that either says "yes" or "no" to the question "has this user been to this exact URL at some point in the past?"

JacobAldridge• 16 years ago

Here's Mozilla's linked post on this, from March of this year - http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2010/03/31/plugging-the-css...

To support your statement, I haven't found anything saying this has been removed.

fhars• 16 years ago

There seems to be a partial fix in the 4.0 codebase: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147777#c259

andrewgph• 16 years ago

The styling of a:visited elements seems to have been removed in Chromium, there's some discussion of this here:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=56802

So I don't think history sniffing using this method is possible anymore in Chromium. I disappointingly found this out when playing around with facebook history sniffing, so if anyone thinks I'm wrong please let me know!

chopsueyar• 16 years ago

Favorite tube aggregators?

gyardley• 16 years ago

I've seen this technique used, in conjunction with popular sites that skew heavily male or female, to guess the gender of the user for ad targeting.

I've also seen this technique used on software-as-a-service sites to check for visits to competitors. If the user's already visited a competitor's landing page, an us vs. them feature comparison is shown. If the user's visited a competitor's page that's only accessed by their paying customers, offer them a coupon for switching. If the user has never visited a competitor at all, don't mention any - why educate the user about alternatives?

Using history sniffing to validate the quality of data purchased from BlueKai is a new one to me, but plausible.

Whatever the rationale, it's still a violation of user privacy.

RBr• 16 years ago

This has been around since at least 2006: http://crypto.stanford.edu/sameorigin/

napierzaza• 16 years ago

I didn't need to imagine a porn site sniffing anything thank you.

chunkbot• 16 years ago

These are the 23 sites that YouPorn is checking for:

pornhub.com

redtube.com

adultfriendfinder.com

xvideos.com

tube8.com

xnxx.com

megaporn.com

megarotic.com

xhamster.com

awempire.com

realitykings.com

brazzers.com

xtube.com

bangbros1.com

fling.com

freeones.com

myfreepaysite.com

debonairblog.com

payserve.com

maxporn.com

videosz.com

aebn.net

pornorama.com

Legion• 16 years ago

Thanks for the links.

spot• 16 years ago

my fav use of this: http://didyouwatchporn.com/ esp the viral part where you can get a report from all your friends.

cmer• 16 years ago

Totally broken for me. Says I didn't watch pr0n. oops!

endlessvoid94• 16 years ago

"Porn enthusiasts" is quite a descriptor.

MrFlibble• 16 years ago

Perhaps "aficionado" would be better, you know, for classy porn.

History Sniffing: How YouPorn Checks What Other Porn Sites You’ve Visited

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