Facebook, Google and Twitter block Hong Kong from accessing user data
Moves by social media companies follow rollout of China’s national security law
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Online message platform Reddit, which counts China’s Tencent among its investors, said in a statement: “All legal requests from Hong Kong are bound by careful review for validity and with a special attention to human rights implications.”
In a follow-up statement, it said that it had not received any requests from Hong Kong and that its “policies on protecting user information are in no way influenced by our investors”
Snap, another company that has received investment from Tencent, declined to comment on whether it will continue to process Hong Kong government requests or not.
https://www.ft.com/content/08e9c0f4-132c-4097-a8df-59094befa57b
#asia #china #hongkong #privacy #reddit
Moves by social media companies follow rollout of China’s national security law
...
Online message platform Reddit, which counts China’s Tencent among its investors, said in a statement: “All legal requests from Hong Kong are bound by careful review for validity and with a special attention to human rights implications.”
In a follow-up statement, it said that it had not received any requests from Hong Kong and that its “policies on protecting user information are in no way influenced by our investors”
Snap, another company that has received investment from Tencent, declined to comment on whether it will continue to process Hong Kong government requests or not.
https://www.ft.com/content/08e9c0f4-132c-4097-a8df-59094befa57b
#asia #china #hongkong #privacy #reddit
Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting
Recently, I was using a page on Reddit (i.e. the main redesign domain, not old.reddit.com), when I saw a yellow bar from Firefox
Why did Reddit want to use DRM? This pop-up was appearing on all pages, even on pages with no audio or video. To find out, I did a bunch of source code analysis and found out.
Reddit’s source code uses bundling and minification, but I was able to infer that in ./src/reddit/index.tsx, a script was conditionally loaded into the page. If the show_white_ops A/B test flag was set, then it loaded another script: https://s.udkcrj.com/ag/386183/clear.js. That script loads https://s.udkcrj.com/2/4.71.0/main.js (although it appears to test for a browser bug involving running JSON.parse with null bytes, and sometimes loads https://s.udkcrj.com/2/4.71.0/JSON-main.js instead, but I haven’t analyzed this file (it looks fairly similar though), and also does nothing if due to another browser bug, !("a" == "a"[0]) evaluates to true).
The purpose of all of this appears to be both fingerprinting and preventing ad fraud. I’ve determined that udkcrj.com belongs to White Ops. I have infered this from the name of Reddit’s feature flag, and mentions of White Ops which is a “global leader in bot mitigation, bot prevention, and fraud protection”. They appear to do this by collecting tons of data about the browser, and analyzing it. I must say, their system is quite impressive.
https://smitop.com/post/reddit-whiteops/
#reddit #drm #tracking
Recently, I was using a page on Reddit (i.e. the main redesign domain, not old.reddit.com), when I saw a yellow bar from Firefox
Why did Reddit want to use DRM? This pop-up was appearing on all pages, even on pages with no audio or video. To find out, I did a bunch of source code analysis and found out.
Reddit’s source code uses bundling and minification, but I was able to infer that in ./src/reddit/index.tsx, a script was conditionally loaded into the page. If the show_white_ops A/B test flag was set, then it loaded another script: https://s.udkcrj.com/ag/386183/clear.js. That script loads https://s.udkcrj.com/2/4.71.0/main.js (although it appears to test for a browser bug involving running JSON.parse with null bytes, and sometimes loads https://s.udkcrj.com/2/4.71.0/JSON-main.js instead, but I haven’t analyzed this file (it looks fairly similar though), and also does nothing if due to another browser bug, !("a" == "a"[0]) evaluates to true).
The purpose of all of this appears to be both fingerprinting and preventing ad fraud. I’ve determined that udkcrj.com belongs to White Ops. I have infered this from the name of Reddit’s feature flag, and mentions of White Ops which is a “global leader in bot mitigation, bot prevention, and fraud protection”. They appear to do this by collecting tons of data about the browser, and analyzing it. I must say, their system is quite impressive.
https://smitop.com/post/reddit-whiteops/
#reddit #drm #tracking