Comment by ryan-c | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryan-c | Hacker News Reader

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If I recall correctly, I downloaded all of them, then pruned any that appeared to have non-deterministic behaviour (for example, using random), then used the offline testing script[0] helpfully provided by the site.

It was the first piece of code I put out that someone referred to as "art"[1].

Some others that hit the HN front page over the years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10195358

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9516824

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26615938

I also had wrote some code for my former employer containing the magic string "haha jit go brrr" that raised some eyebrows when someone reverse engineering the code noticed it. It was part of a routine to try to coax the JIT into optimizing the code soon on low end Android devices for performance reasons, but someone who didn't understand what the code was doing thought it was part of an exploit... :facepalm:

0. https://rpscontest.com/rpsrunner.py

1. https://rya.nc/threads/art-and-beauty.html

> I also had wrote some code for my former employer containing the magic string "haha jit go brrr"

https://iter.ca/post/reddit-whiteops/

The code that checked for DRM support set the "distinctiveIdentifier" config option to "not-allowed" specifically to avoid being useful for tracking. Most of the stuff that people think is "fingerprinting" is just trying to confirm the browser is what it claims to be. It is (or was) tricky to make DRM work in chromium compiled from source.

`!("a" == "a"[0])` just detects IE6/7, as they return undefined for "a"[0]: https://unspecified.wordpress.com/2008/06/15/portable-javasc...

Here's the slide deck for a con talk I did a while back: https://rya.nc/files/A_nickel_tour_of_the_ad_fraud_ecosystem...

I haven't worked there for a couple of years though.

How is that related?

> Contains what appears to be a Javascript engine JIT exploit/bug, "haha jit go brrrrr" appears in a part of the code that appears to be doing something weird with math operations.

Here's the explanation from someone less wise but with a better memory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8441292

:) the only extra bit of info there is that the seed was found by brute force over a few days

ROFL. Good find. I'd forgotten I left it running that long, I thought it was probably just overnight. Nowadays when I want to brute force something like that, I just rent a couple hundred cores for an hour.

(and pray to the gods I don't somehow leave the instances running by mistake)

> If I recall correctly, I…

Only on HN does someone asks questions about an obscure cool thing and the original author enters the discussion. Thanks for the explanation.

Imagine my surprise at opening the comments and seeing a reference to some obscure art I made a dozen years ago.

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