Doesn't seem to work with Firefox + NoScript [LWN.net]

Doesn't seem to work with Firefox + NoScript

Posted Sep 2, 2009 20:47 UTC (Wed) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]

The site uses 2 methods, the first uses JavaScript to get the information, the second that you were redirected to uses CSS. The CSS technique basically uses the hidden image trick by setting visted urls to have a certain background image at a certain url.

And you DO have to wait a good while for it to do the scan (using javascript and css). There's a page about the technical details: http://whattheinternetknowsaboutyou.com/docs/details.html

Doesn't seem to work with Firefox + NoScript

Posted Sep 2, 2009 21:34 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

This second method has been disabled temporarily due to heavy traffic, or so the page says. So now you have to enable JavaScript for a couple of sites.

Doesn't seem to work with Firefox + NoScript

Posted Sep 3, 2009 14:20 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

The hidden image trick is very easy to avoid, just add the following to your userContent.css:

:link, :visited { background-image: none !important }

This does not disable the visited link color, only the background image, so you still need NoScript.

Doesn't seem to work with Firefox + NoScript

Posted Sep 3, 2009 15:50 UTC (Thu) by kfiles (subscriber, #11628) [Link]

> The hidden image trick is very easy to avoid, just add the following to
> your userContent.css:

> :link, :visited { background-image: none !important }

I've noticed that sites like
http://ha.ckers.org/weird/CSS-history.cgi

are tricker. They attach a background-image to a child of the <a> tag. For example, the following CSS rule:

a:visited span.span0 {
background: url(CSS-history.cgi?xxx);
}

applied to:
<a href="www.google.com">http://www.google.com
<span class="span0">VISITED</span>
</a>

So you'll also need the following in your userContent.css:

:link *, :visited * { background-image: none !important; }

Doesn't seem to work with Firefox + NoScript

Posted Sep 3, 2009 16:58 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

Thanks for that one, now the rule I am using is

:link, :visited, :link *, :visited * { background-image: none !important }

Note that the site you linked to still shows a large red "VISITED", even though it is not logging anything anymore (you have to follow the link below the table to see nothing was actually logged). Which implies there are probably several other ways of bypassing this userContent.css rule (perhaps playing with display: and using a IMG, for instance; I haven't tested).