GoKawiil
Tech News
Amazon is selling Sony's ULT WEAR over-ear noise-canceling wireless headphones for $132.95, down from their $249.99 list price. The headphones feature a dedicated bass-boost button, active noise cancellation, up to 50 hours of battery life, and multipoint Bluetooth pairing.
Researcher Matthew Callaghan discovered AliExpress running hidden scripts that generate silent, inaudible sound waves through the WebAudio API to create a unique fingerprint of each visitor's browser. He noticed the tracking only because it interfered with his multipoint Bluetooth headphones, cutting off phone audio whenever the AliExpress tab was open. The scripts muted the sound with a zero gain setting so users would never notice, but the browser still processed and transmitted the audio data back to the site.
Researchers discovered that AliExpress's homepage runs hidden, inaudible audio-processing code tied to Alibaba's security systems, which measures how a device's hardware handles an audio signal to create a unique fingerprint without cookies. The behavior was uncovered by a developer whose Bluetooth headphones failed to switch between devices while an AliExpress tab stayed open, since the silent audio graph kept the system's audio path active even when muted. The same scripts reportedly also collected canvas, WebGL, and hardware configuration data as part of a broader tracking setup.