Top all-time · #2420
Jonathan Mayer
Personal blog · webpolicy.orgsecuritypolitics
Jonathan Mayer writes Web Policy, a personal blog at webpolicy.org about security and politics. Since 2012, 34 different Hacker News readers have linked it 44 times, most often “The Turn-Verizon Zombie Cookie”. The last post was in 2015, but the archive is still widely read.
A blog about technology, policy, and law. By Jonathan Mayer. Please note: this site has been archived. I now write elsewhere.
Most-linked posts?
- The Turn-Verizon Zombie Cookie4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-01-14
- Stanford researchers find diseases, guns, religion, and more in phone metadata3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-03-12
- AT&T Hotspots: Now with Advertising Injection3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-08-25
- The New Firefox Cookie Policy2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-02-22
- The NSA’s Domestic Cybersecurity Surveillance2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-06-05
- Google and 3rd party cookies in Safari - Ouch2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-02-17
- You Can’t Backdoor a Platform2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-04-28
- Is Instacart deceptive?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-07-08
- How Verizon's Advertising Header Works2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-10-24
What Hacker News says?
quantcast was sued for resuscitating browser cookies when flash LSOs persisted [1], ie taking the cookie value from the LSO and recookie-ing the browser. quantcast and clearspring settled for $2.5m [2]. The crux of the matter seemed to be that users didn't know such data was in flash cookies or associated with quantcast, making it hard to opt-out, though I'm not sure if this is illegal; and violated quantcast and th…
Comment linking /2015/01/14/turn-verizon-zombie-cookie/
on “How Verizon and Turn Defeat Browser Privacy Protections”Submitted In memory of Aaron, bulk XML of every federal and state law and court ruling as a story · 284 points
HN discussionDiscussion for the original researcher's post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8889224 http://webpolicy.org/2015/01/14/turn-verizon-zombie-cookie/
Comment linking /2015/01/14/turn-verizon-zombie-cookie/
on “How Verizon and Turn Defeat Browser Privacy Protections”Submitted AT&T Hotspots: Now with Advertising Injection as a story · 150 points
HN discussion> The proper course of action in this case is to use your 4G/5G connection and not to connect to shady networks you don't trust. Sadly, there are carriers on this planet who think it's a good idea to charge ridiculous prices for mobile data (Germany) or to block hotspot functionality unless you pay up (US, see [1] for the technical background - both Apple and Google are complicit). In a world where politicians would…
Comment linking /2014/10/24/how-verizons-advertising-header-works/
on “Attackers can decloak routing-based VPNs”Submitted How Verizon's Advertising Header Works as a story · 146 points
HN discussionIn one of the major announcements for Chrome, 'Moving towards a more secure web' (2016-09-08) [1], the Chrome Security Team writes: "Chrome currently indicates HTTP connections with a neutral indicator. This doesn't reflect the true lack of security for HTTP connections. When you load a website over HTTP, someone else on the network can look at or modify the site before it gets to you." The word 'modify' is a hyperl…
Comment linking /2015/08/25/att-hotspots-now-with-advertising-injection/
on “Google Home Beats Amazon Echo in Q1 2018 Smart Speaker Shipments”Submitted A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Coursera as a story · 124 points
HN discussionHopefully Firefox will have a way to let the user enable the few places where third party cookies are desired They do. The title of the bug is "Block cookies from sites I haven't visited" and the blog post[1] explains that any site with 1st party cookies can set 3rd party cookies on other sites. Apparently this is how Safari works too. [1] http://webpolicy.org/2013/02/22/the-new-firefox-cookie-polic...
Comment linking /2013/02/22/the-new-firefox-cookie-policy/
on “Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies”Submitted The Turn-Verizon Zombie Cookie as a story · 12 points
HN discussionSafari already blocks most third-party cookies, yet Google Analytics works in Safari. An explanation of how GA pulls it off can be found here: http://webpolicy.org/2012/02/17/safari-trackers/
Comment linking /2012/02/17/safari-trackers/
on “Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies”Submitted Crypto Backdoors Wouldn't Work as a story · 10 points
HN discussionGoogle deserves plenty of credit for Scholar. It's the best public legal research system out there. Let's not pretend, though, that Google Scholar has "set free" court opinions or offers "open access." You're trapped in Google's ecosystem. You can't download opinions in bulk for any reason, whether it's legal practice or academic analysis. You certainly can't build your own legal research system. The best "open acce…
Comment linking /2013/05/03/advancing-empirical-legal-scholarship-federal-appellate-opinions-and-rules/
on “Case law is set free; what next?”Submitted Is Instacart (YC S12) Deceptive? as a story · 7 points
HN discussionWow, this is a totally uncredited ripoff of some analysis by Stanford Law's Jonathan Mayer. The image is essentially a remake of one he put together. In favor of changing the link. http://webpolicy.org/2015/06/04/nsa-cybersecurity/
Comment linking /2015/06/04/nsa-cybersecurity/
on “Proposed Info Sharing Legislation Could Worsen NSA Surveillance”Submitted Setting the Record Straight on Google’s Safari Tracking as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThe reporting on our work has been of mixed quality. Check out our actual blog-post here: http://webpolicy.org/2013/12/23/metaphone-the-nsas-got-your-... for more accurate details. We used data collected from voluntary users' phone logs as our phone number data set. This means that if Joe called number X a few weeks ago and then decided to participate in our study, number X was in our database. We then used a couple…
Comment linking /2013/12/23/metaphone-the-nsas-got-your-number/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=metaphone-the-nsas-got-your-number
on “Stanford Researchers Find Connecting Metadata With User Names is Simple”Submitted Is Instacart deceptive? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHuh, apparently it was the same Stanford grad student who busted Google for the Safari cookies and Verizon for the respawning cookies. Kinda cool. http://webpolicy.org/2012/02/17/safari-trackers/ http://webpolicy.org/2015/01/14/turn-verizon-zombie-cookie/
Comment linking /2015/01/14/turn-verizon-zombie-cookie/
on “Am I Being Tracked”Submitted Stanford researchers find diseases, guns, religion, and more in phone metadata as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMachine learning just on text message metadata can probably be surprisingly accurate on classifying relationships and situations like friend, lover, employee, breakup, drug dealer, prostitute. Compare https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/13/phone-cal... which included some manual analysis and use of telephone directories and some automated analysis. (Their data set was tiny and derived from opt-in contrib…
Comment linking /2014/03/12/metaphone-the-sensitivity-of-telephone-metadata/
on “Queens of the Stoned Age”Submitted The New Firefox Cookie Policy as a story · 4 points
HN discussionGlad there are people like Jonathan that take the time to do things like dump federal/state caselaw and related materials: http://webpolicy.org/2013/12/29/advancing-empirical-legal-sc... http://webpolicy.org/2013/05/03/advancing-empirical-legal-sc... http://webpolicy.org/2013/08/09/advancing-empirical-legal-sc... Also, he had an interesting start to Coursera's security: http://webpolicy.org/2014/09/04/a-funny-thing-…
Comment linking /2013/08/09/advancing-empirical-legal-scholarship-federal-trial-opinions-and-rules/
on “Stanford MOOC on Government Surveillance”Submitted You Can’t Backdoor a Platform as a story · 3 points
HN discussionoriginal: http://webpolicy.org/2015/08/25/att-hotspots-now-with-advert...
Comment linking /2015/08/25/att-hotspots-now-with-advertising-injection/
on “a thread”Submitted You Can’t Backdoor a Platform as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Is Instacart Deceptive? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Google and 3rd party cookies in Safari - Ouch as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted You Can't Backdoor a Platform as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Is Instacart (YC12) deceptive? as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
