alt Hacker NewsRecently I have been getting a request from chrome for access to local network devices. I can’t figure out which site I’m visiting is doing this, because the request doesn’t specify which tab. I would LOVE a little icon for something like that.
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Any chance it was a macOS prompt? Chrome needs local network permissions for WebRTC, Cast etc. even without any website accessing your local network.
Chrome says "this site", no? Isn't it the tab you have in focus?
I wonder what kind of person says 'Yes' to this prompt. It gives me the heebie jeebies.
pretty sure it is a way of fingerprinting your machine/network
Yeah, that’s always an automatic nope. No explanation of who/what is really asking or why so, no: your shit software or website can’t go snooping around on whatever network I happen to be on, whether that’s at home or at work.
ebay does this i think, someone else linked a post about port scanning
I had this and it turned out to be my unifi firewall block triggering a false-positive in the browser.
Something in my work's SSO / auth mechanism does this and if you click No it silently screws up the internal website you're visiting. It doesn't block you from logging in, just parts of the site don't load/work. I haven't been able to get a good answer on what the heck is going on but it's extremely annoying.
Are you running PiHole, Adguard or similar and using macOS? On macOS, Chrome treats 0.0.0.0 as a local address which results in these prompts. Switching to having blocked domains return NXDOMAIN can work around the issue.