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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by TriLinder@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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An external image showing your user-agent and the total "hit count"

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[-] A_A@lemmy.world 17 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Exactly. The text of this post is simply :

![An external image showing your user-agent and the total "hit count"](https://trilinder.pythonanywhere.com/image.jpg)
I get the same result when I browse directly to the link.

So, if OP links a malcious website we have a problem ... (?).

[-] goddard_guryon@sopuli.xyz 10 points 11 months ago

Oh dangit, it's simpler than I thought. So the only data being sent is...just whatever is sent in your average GET request.

[-] newIdentity@sh.itjust.works 13 points 11 months ago

Yes. It's also a pretty standard way of serving images. A lot of Email clients do that too.

That's also how these services that show you when a email is read work.

[-] newIdentity@sh.itjust.works 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Not really that huge of a problem. When making requests you also usually send a header which includes the user agent.

The program just logs how many times the image has been requested and it reads the user agent data. No Javascript is actually executed.

Well it might be possible to have a XSS somehow but I haven't really done much research into this possibility.

In general it's a pretty standard way of handling embedded images. Email does this too. That's how you have these services that can check if someone read a mail

this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
599 points (96.6% liked)

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