Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Is this a cat-and-mouse game that's worth playing for Chrome?

Browsers are so complex that I imagine incognito mode is always going to leave some kinds of statistical signatures that can be detected and exploited through merely moderate cleverness, but will be much harder to hide on Chrome's side.

Is it worth it for Chrome? Or would resources be better spent on other parts of the browser?

It's not really a privacy/security problem or anything as far as I can tell -- just a way to bypass paywalls, right? "Sites not detecting my incognito mode" never felt like part of the web's "contract" to me.

View on HN

One part of the "web's contract" is that googlebot and other scrapers should get what the users get. And vice versa - if you're telling googlebot that there's a particular text available to the public; I'd expect to get the same content that you just gave googlebot and not something else, thank you very much.

That used to be the case. But Google has long ago given certain sites a pass on that.

Did they? This fight against Incognito mode suggests otherwise

Ever try to click on a LinkedIn profile from a search result? Most of them just show a LinkedIn login screen, and none of the text from the search result's snippet.

Shocking I know, but it seems like Google contradicting other parts of Google due to a lack of strategic leadership, which almost never happens. Daily...

Google will index paywalled content from news sites provided they annotate it correctly. [1]

[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/paywall...

What do scrapers and indexing engines have to do with it? Is it normal for them to run a full headless browser in incognito mode?

I was under the impression that they're either just doing straight HTTP requests for HTML only... or they're running a full headless browser in normal mode.

So I'm not getting what's different here?

Sites have a long history of serving up different content to different users, e.g. to paying users, or blocking certain countries based on content contracts. It's certainly not part of the "web's contract" that scrapers get paywalled content they haven't paid for.

As far as cat and mouse games go, it's one that's tilted heavily in favor of the Chrome devs. The mice have to advertise themselves very conspicuously in order to gain utility from their workarounds. Cats can usually catch mice that announce themselves.

All they have to do is navigate to a site using incognito mode detection and briefly review the code to find the next hole to plug. In this case, probably stop advertising the correct limit for incognito mode, and introduce latencies on writes to mimic a real file system. These are not a trivial fixes, but they also are not hard.

Pretty important for scrapers ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com