Comments on: Tracking without cookies part 2

By: Gareth Heyes

Gareth Heyes — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:19:35 +0000

Francis the script works with some equipment/browsers but isn’t reliable enough to use in any real world situations.

I found it a interesting experiement and it does work quite well with some configurations but only for that session.

By: Francis

Francis — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:08:48 +0000

But wouldn’t ever link start a new connection? Most browsers do some sort of piplineing but they also use multiple connections.

By: Gareth Heyes

Gareth Heyes — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 13:08:26 +0000

Source code uploaded.

By: Gareth Heyes

Gareth Heyes — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 13:03:30 +0000

Yes no problem I shall release the source code, the code is quite simple really and would only retain the id as long as the connection is alive.

By: iamsure

iamsure — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 23:24:30 +0000

Any chance you could publish the code for this? I’m surprised at how well it produces the same hash across 3 browsers (Safari seems to do things differently), and even across two machines behind one gateway. Would be very useful for web based games to detect users trying to play multiple accounts on a single PC.

By: Gareth Heyes

Gareth Heyes — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:28:20 +0000

It was just a discussion on a mailing list about cookie-less tracking.

You could use a query string but this could be modified quite easily by the user. It was only an experiment just to see what was possible really.

By: Richard Heyes

Richard Heyes — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:34:27 +0000

Ummm, not wanting to rain on your parade, but what’s wrong with cookies or the query string? Granted using the query string can prevent caching, but there are ways around that.

By: Gareth Heyes

Gareth Heyes — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:06:39 +0000

Yeah it only uses the first section of the IP address but you could change it to use the user agent or other variables.

Still I found it interesting anyway.

By: emanresU

emanresU — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 10:58:26 +0000

Not a good idea to rely on IP address. Some people may change IP address because they use a proxy and do not send POST request through proxy (like Google Web Accelerator do) for example.