Re: [Public WebGL] about the VENDOR, RENDERER, and VERSION strings

[steve@sjbaker.org]

So if we think that there are ~10 bits of information leaked through the
VENDOR/RENDERER/VERSION strings - the important question is how much of
that is also leaked through gl.GetParameter and other easily testable
means?

If that number is anywhere close to 10 bits then simply disabling the
VENDOR/RENDERER/VERSION strings just makes life inconvenient for the good
guys without buying us anything in terms of privacy from the bad guys. 
The only way to fix THAT would be to dumb everything down to the lowest
common denominator...and IMHO, that's suicide for WebGL...or at least for
whichever browser does it if others do not.

There certainly COULD be 10 bits of information here - but it's hard to
tell how much variability there is out there without doing some kind of
large-scale survey.  Also, we don't know how well that correlates with the
other bits of data that can already be obtained.  We'd also have to worry
that every time we introduce a WebGL extension (some of which are too
important to miss out on) or provide any other kind of optional feature,
that we're leaking more data.  Adding extensions to WebGL would probably
be the strongest 'signal' we could be sending.

The values that seem most useful are:

  ALIASED_LINE_WIDTH_RANGE, ALIASED_POINT_SIZE_RANGE,ALPHA_BITS
  COMPRESSED_TEXTURE_FORMATS, DEPTH_BITS, MAX_COMBINED_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS
  MAX_CUBE_MAP_TEXTURE_SIZE, MAX_FRAGMENT_UNIFORM_VECTORS
  MAX_RENDERBUFFER_SIZE, MAX_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS, MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE
  MAX_VARYING_VECTORS, MAX_VERTEX_ATTRIBS, MAX_VERTEX_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS
  MAX_VERTEX_UNIFORM_VECTORS, MAX_VIEWPORT_DIMS,
  NUM_COMPRESSED_TEXTURE_FORMATS, NUM_SHADER_BINARY_FORMATS, SAMPLE_BUFFERS
  STENCIL_BITS, SUBPIXEL_BITS

I still think this is too tough. Dumbing everything down to lowest common
denominator is too painful when that lowest common denominator is a
cellphone.



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