More sneaky spyware bullshit causing problems as a side effect of its primary nefariousness

Yet another reason to avoid AliExpress, as if we need more.

Their website makes it damn near impossible to make a purchase (buy 3 more for this deal!!!), changes prices when you put something in the cart, charges multiple times for shipping and then provides inaccurate tracking info once something finally ships. Last time I had a month's delay because everything sat for more than a week in the U.S. after clearing customs.

Never again.

Honestly, this doesn't sound like spyware. More like absurd optimization. Here's why: Audio devices often go to sleep (to save battery) and can take a second or two to wake up. That's enough time that the end user will miss the first second or two of audio.

By keeping the audio outputting something (even if it's just silence), they can guarantee that their little (often hilariously terrible) product videos will play the way they expect (which is loud and startling, of course!).

This is just one of those stupid tricks that's bad for energy use but good for ignorant users who might complain that the first second of every AliExpress video is silent 🤷

The reason why I believe this to be the case is because there's really nothing unique or interesting to be learned from an audio output loop that's literally sending zeros through itself. If you wanted to use that to fingerprint a user, you wouldn't need to keep it active. You could pass a single zero (silence) through and be done.

The constructor stack traces pointed to two scripts:

• https://assets.aliexpress-media.com/g/AWSC/uab/1.140.0/collina.js
• https://assets.aliexpress-media.com/g/AWSC/fireyejs/1.231.67/fireyejs.js

The WebAudio test is not the only measurement in these scripts. Inspection of the bundles found code that queries or measures:
canvas rendering and toDataURL()
WebGL renderer information, extensions, and shader precision
audio oscillator and analyser output
screen and viewport dimensions
device pixel ratio
hardware concurrency and device memory
installed browser plugins
supported audio and video formats
WebRTC behaviour
browser performance timing
mouse, touch, focus, and scroll events
device motion and orientation
properties commonly associated with browser automation \

Blocking those 2 scripts with ublock worked, according to the author, which is good. I shop on ali once in a while and, while I expect a lot of stupid fucking shit and an actually insufferable experience without ublock, from it and any other marketplace site, that's way too sneaky

Is that bad?