5622 - Blogger problems

Here is the headline...

"A New Attack Can Unmask Anonymous Users on Any Major Browser.

Researchers have found a way to use the web’s basic functions to identify who visits a site—without the user detecting the hack."

Here's the link...

https://www.wired.com/story/web-deanonymization-side-channel-attack-njit/

Just a brief and confusing explanation...

"The technique is known as a “side channel attack” because the researchers found that they could accurately and reliably make this determination by training machine learning algorithms to parse seemingly unrelated data about how the victim’s browser and device process the request. Once the attacker knows that the one user they allowed to view the content has done so (or that the one user they blocked has been blocked) they have de-anonymized the site visitor."

A little further down in the article...

"The researchers developed a browser extension that can thwart such attacks, and it is available for Chrome and Firefox. But they note that it may impact performance and isn’t available for all browsers."

In the above sentence, Chrome and Firefox had links to load the extension into Chrome or Firefox. I use Chrome mostly so I downloaded the extension. Did it work? Hard to tell since the attack it is supposed to be preventing is undetectable. So I'm cruising along, fat, dumb, and happy. 

Soon I notice I'm having problems with Blogger. It says I'm not signed in. When I try to sign in I get error messages, close the message, and then I can do what I was trying to do, but later it says I'm not signed in again. My biggest problem was trying to leave comments. YOU'RE NOT SIGNED IN! ... YES I AM!!!!

I couldn't figure out what was going on but you probably did already. It finally dawned on me about the new extension I just installed. I turned it off. Everything works again. I think the magic extension still needs some work.

*****

BTW, nobody is going to spam jail anymore. I think Blogger actually fix the problem.