Tag: identify

Device Fingerprinting

Often it can be beneficial to ‘more’ uniquely identify your users. For applications this is trivial, but in a web browser this can be accomplished via only a few attributes.

  • HTTP – User-Agent, IP Address, Content types and languages accepted.
  • HTTPS/SSL – the keys and encryption methods available to a specific user may vary for each client configuration.
  • HTML5 – local storage and capabilities supported.
  • Geolocation – this is included in HTML5, but also supported in many clients without full HTML5 support, or via browser extensions.
  • JavaScript – Installed version – and many DOM attributes/capabilities such as timezone, installed plugins, screen sizes and fonts from the browser can be detected.
  • Java (Applet) – Installed version – this can often be used to get additional information regarding the client system directly from the VM or Operating System itself. (* Persistent Cookies possible)
  • Flash – Installed version – this can often be used to get additional information regarding the client system directly from the Operating System itself. (* Persistent Cookies possible)
  • Silverlight (for Microsoft Windows) – – Installed version and additional information from Operating System?
  • GoogleGEARS (deprecated) – Installed version and additional information from Operating System such as Geolocation

REFERENCES:

JQuery equivalent to Element.identify(el)

Migrating between various javascript frameworks can often prove difficult, especially when developers become comfortable with the specific features of one library. Here is a feature that I’ve seen used in PrototypeJS that does not exist in jQuery, but can easily be added with a new function.

PrototypeJS provides an identify(el);function … Element.identify(el);. This is powerful in the sense that it returns the ‘id’ of an element, or automatically generates and assigns one when it is empty.

For jQuery the following can be added to emulate the functionality.

jQuery.fn.identify = function(prefix) {
var i = 0;
return this.each(function() {
if($(this).attr('id')) return;
do {
i++;
var id = prefix + '_' + i;
} while(document.getElementById(id) != null);
$(this).attr('id', id);
});
};

(function($) {// Compliant with jquery.noConflict()
$('span').identify('test');
})(jQuery);