Tootfinder

Researchers detail a technique Meta uses to glean some of its logged-in users' browsing histories from Chromium-based browsers on Android via web identifiers (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/headline-to-come/

Meta and Yandex are de-anonymizing Android users’ web browsing identifiers
Abuse allows Meta and Yandex to attach persistent identifiers to detailed browsing histories.

WebChoreArena: Evaluating Web Browsing Agents on Realistic Tedious Web Tasks
Atsuyuki Miyai, Zaiying Zhao, Kazuki Egashira, Atsuki Sato, Tatsumi Sunada, Shota Onohara, Hiromasa Yamanishi, Mashiro Toyooka, Kunato Nishina, Ryoma Maeda, Kiyoharu Aizawa, Toshihiko Yamasaki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01952

WebChoreArena: Evaluating Web Browsing Agents on Realistic Tedious Web Tasks
Powered by a large language model (LLM), a web browsing agent operates web browsers in a human-like manner and offers a highly transparent path toward automating a wide range of everyday tasks. As web agents become increasingly capable and demonstrate proficiency in general browsing tasks, a critical question emerges: Can they go beyond general browsing to robustly handle tasks that are tedious and complex, or chores that humans often avoid doing themselves? In this paper, we introduce WebChore…

Researchers found that both #Meta snd #Yandex link(ed) IDs between browsers and their native apps by local communication on #Android devices.
E.g. the

\texttt{WebANNS}: Fast and Efficient Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in Web Browsers
Mugeng Liu, Siqi Zhong, Qi Yang, Yudong Han, Xuanzhe Liu, Yun Ma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00521

\texttt{WebANNS}: Fast and Efficient Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in Web Browsers
Approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) has become vital to modern AI infrastructure, particularly in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications. Numerous in-browser ANNS engines have emerged to seamlessly integrate with popular LLM-based web applications, while addressing privacy protection and challenges of heterogeneous device deployments. However, web browsers present unique challenges for ANNS, including computational limitations, external storage access issues, and memory utiliz…

How to Favicon in 2025: Three files that fit most needs
It’s time to rethink how we cook a set of favicons for modern browsers and stop the icon generator madness. Frontend developers currently have to deal with 20 static PNG files just to display a tiny website logo in a browser tab or on a touchscreen. Read on to see how to take a smarter approach and adopt a minimal set of icons that fits most modern needs.
🖌️

How to Favicon in 2025: Three files that fit most needs—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog
Prefer SVG over PNG, trust browsers to downscale, drop obscure formats—the ultimate, exhaustive guide to favicons for modern web. Includes steps for static HTML and Webpack.

If you’re asking yourself … How to Favicon in 2025?!?, this post by @… has you covered:
https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/ho

How to Favicon in 2025: Three files that fit most needs—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog
Prefer SVG over PNG, trust browsers to downscale, drop obscure formats—the ultimate, exhaustive guide to favicons for modern web. Includes steps for static HTML and Webpack.

Ladybird
#browsers

Eine Runde Internet-Geschichte, frisch von der Gulaschprogrammiernacht: "Kein Quantum Trost: Wie ein Firefox an einer Chromium-Vergiftung zugrunde ging." Darin: ein unterhaltsamer, historischer Abriss der Geschichte des Web-Browsers von @… Enjoy:

WAMI: Compilation to WebAssembly through MLIR without Losing Abstraction
Byeongjee Kang, Harsh Desai, Limin Jia, Brandon Lucia
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16048

WAMI: Compilation to WebAssembly through MLIR without Losing Abstraction
WebAssembly (Wasm) is a portable bytecode format that serves as a compilation target for high-level languages, enabling their secure and efficient execution across diverse platforms, including web browsers and embedded systems. To improve support for high-level languages without incurring significant code size or performance overheads, Wasm continuously evolves by integrating high-level features such as Garbage Collection and Stack Switching. However, existing compilation approaches either lack…

Navigating Cookie Consent Violations Across the Globe
Brian Tang, Duc Bui, Kang G. Shin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08996 https://arxi…

Navigating Cookie Consent Violations Across the Globe
Online services provide users with cookie banners to accept/reject the cookies placed on their web browsers. Despite the increased adoption of cookie banners, little has been done to ensure that cookie consent is compliant with privacy laws around the globe. Prior studies have found that cookies are often placed on browsers even after their explicit rejection by users. These inconsistencies in cookie banner behavior circumvent users' consent preferences and are known as cookie consent violation…

Drove through the Blackwall Tunnel to Greenwich and back to Islington yesterday.
South of the river it's all 30MPH speed limits and everything feels too fast and scary compared to the sedate and pedestrian-friendly 20MPH limits in the north.
Since I last went through it, it seems the Blackwall tunnel has added a toll.
The TFL website for setting up to pay the tolls is absolutely awful. Failed in Librewolf, Failed in Firefox. Failed because VPN. Took me four attempts in three different browsers to get it to take payment card details.
Demands *no* special characters in the password?!? And doesn't even tell you what the specific problem with the password is, just "doesn't meet the rules above"
Uses awful validation questions like "mothers maiden name". Bad enough practice to use them at all, but the "memorable date" question restricts to ddmmyy format so you can't even put in a date from outside this century.
For some reason asks for a PIN and and Password both!? Pointless. Then actually refuses the login form if you supply both!?

Setting up the auto-payment doesn't seem to have covered the charges added to the registration plate yesterday, so had to do the payment-details entering yet again to deal with yesterday's charges.
Email validation message contains the link only in the HTML of the email, not the text version, so viewed in Mutt it has no link.
And this all seems to be separate from the Dartford Crossing charge, which had a less crappy but still pretty crappy signup.
Good god council programmers suck at web-dev.
#driving #london #tfl #blackwallTunnel #greenwich