I. Subject Identification
| Location | — reading — |
| Provider | — |
| Timezone | — |
| Mother Tongue | — |
| Telescreen | — |
| Processor | — |
| Graphics | — |
| Runtime | — |
| Touch Surfaces | — |
| Pointing Device | — |
| Power Cell | — |
| Network Address | — |
| Internal Address | — probing — |
| Network Class | — |
| Allocated Storage | — |
| Surface Preference | — |
| Motion Preference | — |
| Objection Filed | — |
| Cookie Apparatus | — |
| Permissions Held | — enumerating — |
II. Typefaces in the Citizen's Possession
The Ministry asked your machine to render strings in many faces and measured the widths returned. The faces that answered are listed below. The combination, in most cases, is unique to one device.
III. Dossier Glyph
Sixteen marks. Their heights are derived from what your device handed over. Same citizen, same glyph. Different citizen, different glyph. The computation occurs on your machine; nothing about it is transmitted. Other citizens with identical equipment would carry the same mark. The Ministry estimates this likelihood to be small.
IV. Capabilities the Party Did Not Exercise
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CANVAS DRAWING …
The Ministry could have asked your device to render a hidden image and read the pixels back as identification. The 2014 Princeton survey found this practice on five percent of the leading hundred-thousand sites. The Ministry abstained. The next page may not.
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AUDIO FINGERPRINT …
A silent tone, synthesised and measured by your sound apparatus, returns a waveform unique to your hardware and drivers. No microphone permission is required. The Ministry did not synthesise the tone.
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CLIPBOARD READ …
One gesture — a click, a tap — would surrender whatever you last copied. A password. An address. A draft message you did not send. Every modern runtime announces the capability. The Ministry did not request it.
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INTERNAL ADDRESS DISCOVERY …
A back-channel built for voice calls also reveals the address of your device on its local network — the floor and corridor of the dwelling, not merely the building. Some runtimes now return only a masked hostname; some still return the raw number.
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CROSS-MINISTRY LOGIN PROBE …
By requesting favicon URLs from other services and watching the responses, a page can learn which ones currently hold your credentials. No permission is required. The technique is documented and legal. The Ministry did not run it. Some pages you opened today did.
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POWER CELL TRACKING …
The pair (charge level, discharge curve) was demonstrated in 2015 to be unique enough to follow a citizen across unrelated sites for up to thirty minutes, with no cookie and no account. One major runtime closed the loophole. Two did not.
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PERMISSION STATE …
Without prompting, the Ministry can ask the runtime which faculties it currently holds open — microphone, camera, location, notifications. The state is returned silently. Whether the citizen consented at some earlier hour is, by then, a matter of record.
V. Sources & Confessions
Every observation above was provided by the citizen's own machine in the first milliseconds after arrival. The Ministry retrieved them through standard, documented browser interfaces. No exploit was required. The design is the disclosure.
On the network address
Your IP address arrives in the header of every request your device makes. The Ministry passes it to ipwho.is — a free geolocation service — which returns city and provider. The lookup is transient. Neither side retains it. Under modern data-protection law an IP address can be personal data when used for tracking. The Ministry does not track. The Ministry does not log. Only the first and last octets are recited on screen. The rest are known and withheld.
On the browser interfaces
Every observation about your device was retrieved through standard JavaScript APIs documented openly by Mozilla. No exploit. No vulnerability. Everything described here is by design.
On font enumeration
Detecting installed typefaces by measuring rendered widths has been documented since 2010. The Electronic Frontier Foundation maintains Cover Your Tracks, a tool that shows how unique your browser is. Most browsers are unique enough to be followed across the open web without any cookie at all. The combination of installed fonts is among the strongest signals.
On canvas marks
A 2014 paper from Princeton's Web Transparency & Accountability Project documented canvas fingerprinting in the wild. Researchers found it on five percent of the top hundred-thousand websites: pages that asked the visitor's browser to render a hidden image and read the result back as an identifier. Your browser supports the technique. The Ministry did not invoke it.
On the clipboard
With a single gesture — a click, a tap — a page can request the contents of the system clipboard via the Clipboard API. A password. An address. The capability is announced by every modern browser. The Ministry did not request it.
On the power cell
Olejnik, Englehardt and Narayanan, in their 2015 paper "The Leaking Battery" (Workshop on Data Privacy Management), demonstrated that the pair (charge percentage, discharge time) was unique enough to follow a citizen for up to thirty minutes across unrelated sites. Firefox removed the API in 2016. Chromium-based browsers continue to expose it.
On the technique that was not run
A page can determine which other services currently hold your login by requesting favicon URLs from those services and observing which respond. Logged-in services return one image; logged-out services return another or none. The technique requires no permission, no exploit, and is widely deployed. The Ministry did not run it. Some pages you opened today did.
On the dossier glyph
Sixteen marks whose heights are computed from a hash of the device profile: graphics, fonts, screen, language, timezone, operating system, runtime, colour depth. Same device, same mark. Different citizen, different mark. The computation occurs in the citizen's browser. Nothing about it is transmitted. Other citizens with an identical profile would carry an identical mark. The Ministry estimates this likelihood to be small.
On the prose
Hand-written. Template-based. No language model writes or rewrites anything at runtime. Where a condition is not covered by hand-written prose, the page stays quiet about it. The Ministry would rather say less than say something false.
On what this page transmitted
One outbound request, to ipwho.is, for geolocation. No identifier. No cookie. No retained log on the Ministry's part. The hosting providers of any site you visit keep transport-level records of the fact of a request for the duration of their default retention (a matter of days). The Ministry did not configure this. Every site you open today produces an identical record, and most also despatch hundreds of additional beacons to advertisers, fingerprinters, session-replay services, and tag-managers. The Ministry sends one, to a geolocation service, and tells you about it.
On what this page stored
Nothing. No cookies. No localStorage. No sessionStorage. No IndexedDB. No service worker cache. When the citizen closes this tab, the Ministry forgets the citizen exists. The Ministry is among the few pages opened today that can honestly say this.
On the source
Open it and read. Cmd+U on Mac, Ctrl+U on Windows or Linux, or right-click and choose "View page source". Everything described above is in the page you are reading. The Ministry has nothing to hide. Most pages cannot honestly say this.
On the original
This is a 1984-themed re-imagining of sinceyouarrived.world/taken by Matt at Rise Up Labs. The original is the better page. This one wears a different coat.