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spanicker
ip-blindness
OPEN SOURCE2020–2021
spanicker / ip-blindness

ip-blindness

Discover this repository through its Hacker News conversations.

3Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
124GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

A public description has not been verified.

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-04-14 18:46:44 UTC to 2021-05-06 19:10:32 UTC.

0122020-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 commentsApr 20202020-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsOct 20202020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsMay 2021

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Apr 20202020-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-05-01 00:00:00 UTC110
May 20202020-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20202020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20202020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20202020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Sep 20202020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20202020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20202020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20202020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC202
Feb 20212021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20212021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC202
Apr 20212021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC202
May 20212021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

9 sources
> at the very least, the ad network will be able to see your IP and know that you like athletic shoes and visited www.wereallylikeshoes.com. If you visit some other domain first-ad-network.com owns with the same IP it within a small window of time, it can be pretty confident it's the same person and even store some client side data at that point. It feels like they can construct a reasonably good profile about their users by using that technique. Yes, there are a lot of user identifying bits in an IP address. Chrome has two proposals: https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness I'm not sure what other browsers are thinking? > That's considering the browser doesn't leak out any other potentially identifying information. Which they definitely do. All the browsers are working on figuring out how to thwart fingerprinting, and it's really hard. I
Read the rest
am glad, at least, that we were able to get Google Ads to publicly commit to not fingerprinting. > when you click on the ad, they know one interest about you and, if you clicked in ads from other campaigns they run, they may reconstruct your profile well Yes, when people click on ads in Turtledove the advertiser does learn something. This is a huge improvement to the status quo where advertisers learn things just by bidding, or an intermediate stage where advertisers learn things when they win an auction -- users don't click on ads very often, so the amount of information leaked this way is very low. Exactly how much information the advertiser is able to learn on a click is still very much up in the air, so if you have views on this you might consider participating on the repo?
In Why I Work on Ads
> It uses SimHash, so any website a user visits on the Internet can reverse engineer the sites a Chrome user was on. How so? A user's cohort is shared by many other users, and for any individual site you have visited it is very likely there will be another user with an identical cohort who has not visited that site. This means you cannot tell exactly which sites any individual has visited. > combined with just IP address its probably a 99+% precise user identifier. IP address alone is already a massive fingerprinting leak, and needs to be addressed if browsers are to prevent cross-site tracking. Chrome is also working on this: https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness
In Opting Your Website Out of Google's FLoC Network
If you want to prevent fingerprinting, you need to look at where the identifying bits are coming from. (ex: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/) The IP address provides enough bits to uniquely identify many users, and when combined with just a few more bits, to identify almost anyone. TOR is one solution here, which you could potentially also describe as "adding forced MitM to every connection". The proposals in https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness/blob/master/near_pa... and https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness/blob/master/willful... have different tradeoffs than TOR, with the "TOR is painfully slow" problem being a big one. If you have better ideas, though, I would be very interested in reading them!
In Google has been testing a replacement for third-party cookies
If we went full IPv6 and everyone had their own unique IP, then tracking people across sites would not require JavaScript, requests to trackers, or even cookies. There are things that are nice about a world like that, but it's definitely a step back in privacy from today where tracking protection tools work pretty well. Willful IP blindness is one way to have communication over IP without allowing it to be used for tracking: https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness
In Show HN: JavaScript-free personal bio hosting

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