This isn't as strange as he makes it sound, it is done to prevent the link color history attack [1]. Most of the other CSS properties aren't allowed on :active or :visited modifiers.
- form/input server-side validation (you would specify a URL as an attribute of the input / form to which what-if data would be posted)
- input auto-complete (same thing, URL in attribute of the input)
- adaptive design (they should rethink CSS with various formats in mind)
With these 3 things alone I think you can pretty much create a fully working JS-free website. You would only need JS if you really need to build a SPA (which should be the exception: online trading platforms, etc).
The fact that now even a blog article is not viewable without JS is a joke.
...and eventually you'd have some chap like the OP here who will come up with a clever way to exfiltrate information somehow anyway.
[1]: https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#TBBJavaScriptEna...
He needs to collect data first in order to be able to say something about that. Panoptoclick [1] can report on uniqueness because they have test data from thousands of clients. Perhaps these fingerprints can be added there for the exposure (and because they will work to identify non-tor browsers as well).
> And how are you going to make the data points into a fingerprint?
The two "scrolling deltas" arrays are very different in nature, you could easily drop all the zeros and boil it down to "all 3" or "not all 3". That would give a nonzero contribution to the number of bits of that form an overall fingerprint. Similarly for the CPU benchmark, a phone is not as powerful as a desktop, so a result of "500" on one and "2800" on another are very likely different machines. So bin it to the nearest 500 and you'll have another non-zero contribution. Repeat for client rectangles and so on.
The "Uber Cookie" is basically a readout of totally random metadata. The CPU benchmark is substantially different each time I run it.
And (as other said) uniformity is increased when using an anonymous/privacy enhancing operating system like Tails or WHONIX underneath.
[1] https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#finge...
EDIT:
Far more interesting is the author's most recent article.... wtf
http://jcarlosnorte.com/security/2016/03/06/hacking-tachogra...