
HTML5: Access Battery status through javascript - josdirksen
http://www.smartjava.org/content/html5-access-battery-status-through-javascript
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sneak
I haven't tested it, but the post claims that this works on iOS, and I've
never seen a preference option to disable this.

Someone clever could use this misfeature (what amounts to a data leak) to
perform a sort of traffic analysis attack and infer data about your
sleeping/working/browsing schedule, and then potentially interpolate travel
patterns, business associations, and maybe even correlate to a precise
(historical) physical location.

The security implications here are vast (and not immediately obvious), and
there is a vanishingly small practical use case for this.

Why does this exist?

"can" != "should", for fuck's sake.

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Terretta
Why would a user leave the web page open through their sleeping working
browsing schedule? Why would a dev use battery status to interpolate travel
patterns instead of, say, the location API or your geo IP?

Given the other things available to a dev wanting to know about a user's
behavior, battery status is a strange one to rant about.

> _The security implications are vast._

No they're not. Battery status has been available to every app on your laptop
for years without a problem. Web pages are ad hoc apps. If you're concerned,
don't install the app, and use NoScript with a whitelist for browsing.

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einhverfr
The problem with web apps though is that they aren't really local to your
computer. We have all kinds of sandboxes to prevent, say, a web page from
opening up a connection to talk to your PCI cards.

I wouldn't say that this is the same as giving battery status to every app on
your laptop. A closer example might be smart phones. But there's a presumption
that if software is running on your laptop or smartphone you have at least
some idea of what it is and what it can do. In practice not so much and such
apps could misuse this data along with others.

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AndrewDucker
It looks like the work that Mozilla are putting in to allow all the
functionality needed for applications to be accessible through the browser is
going well.

Worked perfectly on my laptop, in Firefox 13.

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mbq
And at least one more bit for browser tracking...

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brunnsbe
Now I finally know what the four icons in jQuery UI that shows battery levels
can be used for. :-)

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thedillio
Not working for me on iPad. Cool hack though as some people are having luck.

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seppo0010
Using Firefox 16.0a1 (2012-06-07) on OS X it's telling me my battery is at
100% and charging, while it's at 95% and not charging.

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jnorthrop
From the article "And it doesn't work yet on Mac (does work on iOS, Android
and windows)."

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doogle88
Didn't work for me on Android 4.0.3 in either Chrome or the Android browser

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estel
I suspect it might only be in the Firefox beta stream? (In which case, I'm
surprised to see the OP mention iOS).

