[liberationtech] Anonymous blogger outed by analytics signature

[liberationtech at lewman.us]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 11:34:13AM -0500, g at gwbstr.com wrote 3.0K bytes in 61 lines about:
: Thought it would be worth pointing out this article that reports it's possible in some cases to determine who runs a site because of shared analytics signatures. The writer notes that this risk isn't found in guides to anonymous blogging he consulted.
: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/11/goog-analytics-anony-bloggers/all/1

These cross-site requests are something law enforcement is starting to
rely on more and more.  They are learning that modern web pages are an
amalgam of bits of content served up by different websites. Ad networks,
analytics, gravatar, facebook, twitter streams, etc are all third party
additions to many web pages.  If the main site, say blogger or yelp as
examples, won't give up the IP and relevant details of a person, then
the leo can just look at the page, find all of the other sites and go
ask these 3rd party sites for the details.

If you install the Firefox extension called Request Policy,
https://www.requestpolicy.com/, you will immediately see how much of
the web relies on cross site requests.

-- 
Andrew
pgp key: 0x74ED336B