back to article CDNs: Great for speeding up the internet, bad for location privacy

Using a custom-built tool, a 15-year-old hacker exploited Cloudflare's content delivery network to approximate the locations of users of apps like Signal, Discord, and others. The attack, developed by self-described "15-year-old high school junior" Daniel, is surprisingly straightforward. By exploiting Cloudflare's CDN caching …

  1. DS999 Silver badge

    Finding your location within 100 miles

    Is generally not a concern. I'm sure we can all come up with examples where it is an issue, but in the grand scale of privacy issues this one is so far down the list I don't think it is worth worrying about. Even then you can probably only get within 100 miles in fairly densely populated areas, with less precision the less dense the area you live in. So it would be lucky to pinpoint what state you live in, or what country in the EU.

    1. druck Silver badge

      Re: Finding your location within 100 miles

      Well if you are claiming to be All American Bob posting from the Good old US of A, and someone finds that all your posts are coming from UTC+3... just like with quite a few of our commentard trolls.

  2. Mister Jones

    Ha.....Where Is The Commentard Troll Actually Located?

    @druck

    Quote: "....commentard trolls...."

    .....I'm confused.....don't commentard trolls use VPN?

    So.....UserX (who is actually in Bulgaria) has traffic emerging from a server 100 miles from a USA server.

    So what?

    1. druck Silver badge

      Re: Ha.....Where Is The Commentard Troll Actually Located?

      Even if they use a VPN, analysing the posting time distribution tends to give away their time zone.

    2. CA Dave

      Re: Ha.....Where Is The Commentard Troll Actually Located?

      The point is that it was discovered where the commentard troll's ORIGINATING query was being made - from someone in Bulgaria - not where the VPN endpoint is saying he is supposedly posting from.

      Your reading comprehension sucks.

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