Talk:History sniffing

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Bruxton talk 18:43, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

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• Comment or view
• Article history

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• ... that this link being blue reveals something about you? Source: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2810103.2813632
  • ALT1: ... that history sniffing has been used to track Papa John's customers? Source: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2012/12/ftc-settlement-puts-end-history-sniffing-online-advertising-network-charged-deceptively-gatheringhttps://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2013/03/130315epicmarketplacecmpt.pdf
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Penny (New Zealand pre-decimal coin)

5x expanded by Sohom Datta (talk). Self-nominated at 14:19, 16 November 2023 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/History sniffing; consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.

I mistakenly nominated this under the Creation rule, however, this should have been nominated on the expanded 5x rule. Sohom (talk) 18:33, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Expanded within the window, long enough and generally a reasonable-looking article, with plenty of citations and no obvious issues with NPOV or copyvio. I think ALT1 is the better hook: however, I can't see any mention of Papa John's in the linked article. Are they perhaps mentioned in a different source? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 08:27, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

@undercoverClassicist I've swapped the source for the actual complaint document from FTC which does mention Papa John's. :) Sohom (talk) 14:12, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Approved on that basis. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 15:16, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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This review is transcluded from Talk:History sniffing/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: PCN02WPS (talk · contribs) 00:03, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Happy to review this in the coming days. Ping as requested: @Sohom Datta: PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 00:03, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Lead

• Recommend linking CSS
• Recommend linking Mozilla

Background

• Move link to "Mosaic" to first mention in the paragraph
• "would use purple links" → "used purple links"
• "evolved from its original model of static content towards favouring more dynamic content" → I think you can get away with removing the word "favouring" as the sentence retains meaning without it
• "being able to access each other's execution context and being able to gain access to sensitive information about the user" → a bit repetitive, bolded parts mean the same thing; second instance can be removed

History

• "Color" is spelled in AmEng in the image caption but BrEng in the body of the article
• Alt text would be good for the image
• "As a result of the publication of this research multiple lawsuits were filed" → Since you just mentioned the research in the sentence before, I think the bold part here is unnecessary; maybe add a comma after "result" if you remove the bold bit
• "that were found to have used history sniffing" → passive voice makes this seem a little hand-wavey - was this process of discovering history-sniffing websites a centralized intentional investigation or had various people just stumbled upon them and compiled a list? How would they go about finding out whether a website was doing this or not?
• I would extend the link to the CFAA article to include "of 1986", as in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, that is the full title of the bill and it's being presented as such in the article
• "The defences included" → A minor thing, but "defence" is singular in the previous sentence
• "In addition to this, visited links would" → I'd change "In addition to this" to "Additionally" just to make it a little less wordy
• "with Javascript APIs returning the same attributes" → API needs a link; also recommend either spelling out application programming interface or explaining briefly what that is as an unfamiliar reader (myself included) would have no idea what that is

This is a bit difficult to explain, I've qualified the statement slightly, hope that helps.

• "As a part of a subsequent investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, it was revealed that" → the passive voice in "it was revealed" has the same problem as the passive voice above; this sentence could be significantly simplified by saying "A subsequent investigation by the Federal Trade Commission revealed that..." or something similar
• "allowed Epic Marketplace Inc. to track" → the "Inc." is dropped at the company's second mention, as a more informal reference, before returning here; I'd recommend removing it here and sticking with informal throughout the rest of the article (one more instance of "Inc.", in this section's last sentence)
• Recommend an abbreviation "(FTC)" after the organization's name is spelled out in full with a link so that you can shorten "...the Federal Trade Commission banned..." to "...the FTC banned..."
• "twenty years, and was ordered" → remove comma

Threat model

• No issues

Modern variants

• "over 307 participants" → this comes across to me as a strange way to present a number. I can't access either of the papers that are cited, but I see that the abstract of one of them references 307 participants. Is "over 307" coming directly from one of the papers or did you arrive at that way of presenting it?

Removed "over" since the source does not appear to mention the word "over".

• "researchers in University of California, San Diego demonstrated" → change "in" to "at the"
• "CSS paint API" → this could potentially benefit from a brief explanation

I've tried explaining it briefly in the context of the article, it sucks that we don't have a article about it :(

• "byte-code cache of the browser" → recommend linking cache
• "In recent years" → this is a bit of a tricky phrase, since it is guaranteed to fall out of date before too long. I would recommend changing this to something a little less reliant on the year in which the reader is seeing the article
• Link "cookies" to HTTP cookie

@Sohom Datta: Overall a nicely written article. That's what I've got on my first read through. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 17:25, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

@PCN02WPS:, made the fixes and left some inline comments. Wrt to the access for the papers, I've put links to publicly accessible versions of some of the papers in the sources section below. Reference 18 is the only one that does not have a publicly accessible version, but I can send you a pdf/email you a copy if you need it to verify any details from it. Sohom (talk) 17:52, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

@PCN02WPS Friendly ping in case this fell of your radar. Sohom (talk) 15:32, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

@Sohom Datta Thank you for the ping, somehow I either forgot about or didn't see the first one. Changes look good (I made one small wording change) so I'm happy to give this a thumbs-up! PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 17:30, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Sources

• Ref 4: https://www.csd.uoc.gr/%7Ehy558/papers/leakage_sp.pdf
• Ref 8: https://tom.vg/papers/timing-attacks_ccs2015.pdf
• Ref 10: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~d1jang/paper/ccs10.pdf

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.