Month: April 2021

USB Data-Blocker aka USB Condom

I was recently reading Kevin Mitnick’s “The Art of Invisibility” and found that he’d also recommended these devices. I’ve been using them for several years as it was always unnerving to plug in a mobile device into a work computer to recharge only to see that there was a request to mount them. Additionally, my laptop would occasionally want to tether data via my cell phone. In an effort to block data transfer and leakage, something was required. These simple and cheap devices allow for power but no data to be transferred via the USB port.

WARNING: there’s always the possibility that any USB device could be compromised, including these… keep them in sight and under your control at all times.

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Google Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) – optout

Google Chrome 89 and other browsers based upon it such as Chromium Edge have introduced a new capability known as FLoC. This approach removes the need for third-party cookies by passing a group identifier in the HTTP Headers in a manner similar to how Cookies are exchanged. While FLoC should allow for users to remain more anonymous as advertisers only receive a group identifier for the user, it would not be difficult to use their IP address or other features available via device fingerprinting to track the individual.

As a web user, you would need to use several approaches to avoid this:
1. Use a browser without FLoC support. Hopefully, this will be added to the configuration menus to allow users to prevent it, similar to DNT.
2. Use a browser plugin (or other software/proxy) to remove the FLoC headers.

As a web-developer, you can add configuration to opt-out of all FLoC cohort calculation by sending the following HTTP response header:


Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()

If you really want to see the data, the following javascript will expose it:

const { id, version } = await document.interestCohort();
console.log('FLoC ID:', id);
console.log('FLoC version:', version);

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Javascript let keyword

ECMAScript 6 (ES2015) added the ‘let’ keyword. let works a lot like the legacy ‘var’ keyword, but adds scoping capabilities.

Unfortunately, support cannot be retrofitted to older browsers with a polyfill, supported by IE11(with limitations), Edge 12+, Firefox 44+, Chrome 49+, Safari 10+. If you still need to support older browsers or devices you may want to stick with var.

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Javascript const

Formally introduced in ES6, const was introduced in JavaScript 1.5 and was a Mozilla-specific extension and not part of ECMAScript 5.

Unfortunately, support cannot be retrofitted to older browsers with a polyfill, supported by IE11+, Edge 12+, Firefox 36+, Chrome 21+, Safari 5.1+. If you still need to support older browsers or devices you may want to stick with var.

NOTE: some initial implementations may have thrown different exceptions on reassignment, were not limited in scope, or treated const like ‘var‘.

Name may start with letter, underscore or $ character.

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