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Sampson Profile picture
@jonathansampson
Aug 24, 2019 • 8 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
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The next browser I'd like to inspect is @brave. During the initial run, we can see about 23 calls; all of which go to the brave.com domain.

Below is an image of these sessions, sorted by descending response size. I'll break down these calls in the next Tweet.
The first call is for the integrated Tor client. Second is Brave's internal bits for content-blocking. The third call to brave-core-ext.s3.brave.com is for the HTTPS Everywhere integration. Lastly, a couple lines down, is the updater for local Tracking Protection files.
Two calls are made to static.brave.com near the top; these proxy the request for Safe Browsing bits. This is one thing you'll notice with Brave; it proxies requests when possible so as to mask user details. We see this with the static1 calls further down (updating plugins)
The calls to /extensions on the go-updater.brave.com host are what you'd expect. Brave proxies requests to ensure you're all up to date. With this being the first run, why do we see so many calls for extension updates? It will help to look at these requests in natural order.
The following screenshot shows all of these requests in the order they were issued. Note the calls to the /extensions endpoint precede the downloading of the extensions from brave-core-ext.s3.brave.com. They're for the same extensions. "Do I need this? Yes. Better go get it then."
Brave's requests for these internal bits also carry along data regarding the machine itself: OS, platform, memory, update channel, etc. This data determines which extension bits are appropriate for your device. I believe the 'redundant' call is the extension checking for updates.
So Brave asks the server for critical extensions. The server responds. It then installs these extensions. Once they are installed they issue their own update requests. I believe this is what's happening here. The call to crlsets.brave retrieves a list of certs to block.
That covers pretty much everything I see Brave doing when it first runs. I'm very pleased to see that 100% of the calls are controlled, and secure. And that Brave serves as a proxy for calls that need to reach out to third parties. Very nice 🙂

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More from @jonathansampson

Sampson Profile picture
Oct 2, 2020
WordPress, for all the good it has done, simply cannot help but to screw up the simplest things.

<pre>\\.well-known</pre>

In walks WordPress, "Oh, let me quadruple those backslashes for you."

So I try &#92;, which WordPress then converts into &amp;#92;!

I just can't win here.
Yes, I know to make changes in the TEXT view, and not the Visual view. Tragically, that will give you all sorts of [other] problems, like randomly eating carriage-returns, or inserting a <br> here and there. This utility simply isn't cut-out for sharing code(-like) content.
Wait, wait—I got the formatting to stick, and the content to look the way I wanted.

NOBODY-MOVE-A-MUSCLE…
Read 5 tweets
Sampson Profile picture
Oct 2, 2020
Never again will I call the split method on a string to get an array of characters. From here on out, it's spread all the way 🙂

[...string].map( char =>
char.charCodeAt(0).toString(16)
);

Much nicer than string.split(""), in my opinion. Function with empty string? No thanks!
Now, if only I could convert an array of character strings back to a string without needing to call array.join(""), I'd be set.

I could reduce, but, yuck...

array.reduce( ( s, c ) => s += c, '' )
Is this cheating? 😂

Array.prototype.smüsh = function () {
return this.join('')
}
Read 4 tweets
Sampson Profile picture
Sep 26, 2020
Windows uses values 0D 0A to signify a line-break. Mac uses 0A.

TIL—Windows XP had a bug causing Notepad to insert 0D 0D 0A. It wouldn't save like that, but if you copied and pasted the contents elsewhere the bytes could be preserved to this day.

Computers are hard 🙂
Oh, wait... does Windows 10 use 0A now?

`a
b`.split('').map(x => x.charCodeAt(0).toString(16))

Which produces

["61", "a", "62"]

Or maybe this is JavaScript normalizing it?
I assume 0A alone is enough to force a new line in Windows, but that Windows still uses 0D 0A. I ran:

copy([ '61', '0A', '62' ].map(x => String.fromCharCode(parseInt(x, 16))).join(''))

And pasted from the clipboard into Notepad, and it showed the expected line-break. Odd.
Read 5 tweets
Sampson Profile picture
Sep 26, 2020
D'oh! Working with React and wondered why my UI was partial:

render () {
return (
<A prop={value} />,
<B prop={value} />
)
}

Reminded me how cool the comma operator is in JavaScript:

return Expr, …, Expr

Evaluates each expression, but returns result of last.
Ti be more clear, the return statement returns the result of the Expression (if any) to its right. Expressions can contain Expressions. So each of the expressions in a list are evaluated, but only the result of the final is returned.
I think I first read about this little detail in one of @rauschma's fantastic deep-dive posts, but I'm not sure which one.
Read 6 tweets
Sampson Profile picture
Sep 22, 2020
The Accident: A Short Story

In 1992 Phillip Hallam-Baker and Tim Berners-Lee were developing HTTP. Phillip suggested a request header to record the URI of the linking-document, and "referer" (a spellcheck failure) was born. Servers now knew what site sent you their way.
In 1993 a young developer working on the Mosaic browser added support for inline images. Before this, images could only be linked from a page and viewed separately. Images from remote servers were supported as well, and requests for them would eventually include a referer header.
In 1994 Lou "solved" statelessness on the Web. Cookies could be set by a server, and would be returned to that server with future requests. Session IDs could move out of the URL path, and into a more convenient home. Like images and referer, cookies worked with third parties too.
Read 10 tweets
Sampson Profile picture
Sep 16, 2020
Over the years there have been various ways to sniff the user's web history with CSS and JavaScript. For example, generating 10,000 links & checking their color (visited differs by default). These are now blocked, but I wonder how often advertisers and exchanges engaged in this.
Clever developers would adapt to these changes, turning their focus from the links to the style of adjacent elements with :visited + span, and then reading span's computedStyle to see how it looks. Background images could be used in a similar manner; listen for what loads.
Even when you lock-down CSS, developers would sniff your cache by using sensitive clocks in JS and seeing how quickly resources loads. If 2 similar resources load at very different rates, one could be inferred to have been loaded from cache (indicating user visited a given site).
Read 6 tweets

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