> The leak occurred when four Fields Medal laureate lecture fields, marked "HIDDEN," were discovered in the front-end code of the ICM 2026 official schedule.
So it was easier than I thought. Bot just scraped public page with hidden fields, not a secret page or to-be-published page from database.
I've been working on a site. It's new, domain is only a few weeks old. It's got SSL, so all the bots know it exists. It's never had any sub-pages exposed, just the placeholder lander, no links.
Somehow in Google search one of the unguessable pages is indexed. We have used Claude and Gemini to assist with some design aspects.
I'm thinking some aggressive data ingestion/indexing is happening by all the bots in the quest for frontier models.
I've also seen Google indexing pages with random values in the path that don't get linked to statically (server asks for the URL then redirects to it immediately). I'm pretty sure they index straight out of the Chrome address bar.
Yep. I remember a similar story as GP described from a friend back in 2008. The site he was working on that wasn't linked to yet was suddenly indexed after he checked out what it looked like in the fancy new "Chrome" browser that Google had just released, causing some moderate panic on his end.
It’s absolutely true. It is a documented fact. It was discovered and entered into public record during the DOJ antitrust investigation into Google Chrome.
They call the signal „popularity“ and it is a successor of the Google Toolbar signal.
Why don’t they also capture information you enter into forms on Chrome?
They control the entire browser surface, technically they can know everything, even TLS and E2E encrypted data, that they silently phone home…
If you think this is silly, consider that Microsoft Recall had been observing everything on people’s entire SCREENS and phoning home much of it. That is how a guy was caught recently: https://x.com/t3chfalcon/status/2074134314145489195
They log all DNS requests made to their public resolver in a searchable internal database, at least when I worked there a decade or so ago. I wonder if they seed their crawler with it?
There's a couple avenues besides just stealing what's in your URL bar.
If you don't use wildcard certs all of your subdomains can be scraped from the certificate transparency logs.
Additionally, any domain+cert using HSTS with preload enabled end up in a big list at Google to speed up the initial connection from browser to site.
CT logs just explain how they found the domain. T doesn't explain how they could have found unlinked content on the domain itself. If I put up secret-example.com/asdf-1234567.html, how does that page get found if there are no public links to it?
Google Chrome used to report visited pages back to Google, not sure if this still the case. Also, Google Analytics can see visited pages and Google uses it.
Finding domains is easy, everybody uses CTL to find them.
Nothing you enter into an LLM not hosted by you, or put onto the web is safe from being collected and exploited by these "AI" companies and their LLM's voracious appetite.
Isn't leaking browser extension used by one of people on the team (doesn't need to be developer, could be qa or anybody with whom the access was shared) more plausible?
Well, the angle is kind of important here. The company gets their name in the news, they have a reasonable explanation why they were scraping around, and we end up with a story about innovative tech company whiz-kids who made a funny discovery, while it was the webdevs on the other side that goofed up.
Imagine a private individual just scraped the website (or simply clicked 'view source') for no reason in particular and then told people about it... They'd be labeled an uber-haxxor, face a civil lawsuit asking for ridiculous damages while being threatened with a prison sentence over CFAA violations. Hell, that might even drive some people to suicide.
The fact that an egregious case happened once, decades ago, is probably not sufficient grounding to act like every bit of equally trivial “hacking” always results in massively disproportionate law enforcement response.
Sucks it happened. But we all know that is not the typical scenario.
Yeah that happens all the time. Anyone/thing with popular public releases has fans/journeys scraping the website looking for unreleased material or scoops.
In the early days one of the high profile soaps in the UK published their "catch up" summaries for the week ahead which you could get just by editing the date in the URL. But back then not so many people were looking, so they were doing it for months...
Most of what an LLM does "could have" been done by a human if you throw enough human hours at it. But the reality in this circumstance is that a new tool helped find this leak. Saying this could have happened in a "non LLM world" is analogous to "someone else could have discovered special relativity, let's not mention Einstein"
> The leak occurred when four Fields Medal laureate lecture fields, marked "HIDDEN," were discovered in the front-end code of the ICM 2026 official schedule.
So it was easier than I thought. Bot just scraped public page with hidden fields, not a secret page or to-be-published page from database.
I've been working on a site. It's new, domain is only a few weeks old. It's got SSL, so all the bots know it exists. It's never had any sub-pages exposed, just the placeholder lander, no links.
Somehow in Google search one of the unguessable pages is indexed. We have used Claude and Gemini to assist with some design aspects.
I'm thinking some aggressive data ingestion/indexing is happening by all the bots in the quest for frontier models.
I've also seen Google indexing pages with random values in the path that don't get linked to statically (server asks for the URL then redirects to it immediately). I'm pretty sure they index straight out of the Chrome address bar.
Yep. I remember a similar story as GP described from a friend back in 2008. The site he was working on that wasn't linked to yet was suddenly indexed after he checked out what it looked like in the fancy new "Chrome" browser that Google had just released, causing some moderate panic on his end.
This may have been part of this issue I found a few months back, as no other explanation for how UUID URLs got indexed was found: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47769796
Holy crap I hope that's not true. I've also had unguessable pages indexed, though, and don't have an explanation.
It’s absolutely true. It is a documented fact. It was discovered and entered into public record during the DOJ antitrust investigation into Google Chrome.
They call the signal „popularity“ and it is a successor of the Google Toolbar signal.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-signi...
There's no reason to think it isn't true. It matches every pattern of behavior observed from every tech company.
Why don’t they also read your gmail and get your bank passwords?
And maybe have access to EVERY site actually, with “forgot password” type stuff in addition to providing oauth tokens…
> Why don’t they also read your gmail
Boy do I have news for you.
Something worth inspecting further. We know that Chrome stores and sends the browsing history but this is an interesting vector.
I’d be more surprised if they weren’t capturing this information.
Especially if you have autocomplete-while-searching type of features on.
Why don’t they also capture information you enter into forms on Chrome?
They control the entire browser surface, technically they can know everything, even TLS and E2E encrypted data, that they silently phone home…
If you think this is silly, consider that Microsoft Recall had been observing everything on people’s entire SCREENS and phoning home much of it. That is how a guy was caught recently: https://x.com/t3chfalcon/status/2074134314145489195
And it is actually much worse than even that:
https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillanc...
Are you using Cloudflare by any chance? I think the Crawler Hints setting [1] exposed some of my "secret" pages in the past.
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/advanced-configurati...
They log all DNS requests made to their public resolver in a searchable internal database, at least when I worked there a decade or so ago. I wonder if they seed their crawler with it?
Depending on the CMS, if it's wordpress (15% chance, ha) there is a sitemap function built-in out of the box. The bots don't need to guess.
There's a couple avenues besides just stealing what's in your URL bar.
If you don't use wildcard certs all of your subdomains can be scraped from the certificate transparency logs. Additionally, any domain+cert using HSTS with preload enabled end up in a big list at Google to speed up the initial connection from browser to site.
For hosts, but not pages on the site.
But I think the other explanations take care of pages: cloudflare hints, chrome reporting addresses visited, etc.
CT logs just explain how they found the domain. T doesn't explain how they could have found unlinked content on the domain itself. If I put up secret-example.com/asdf-1234567.html, how does that page get found if there are no public links to it?
Google Chrome used to report visited pages back to Google, not sure if this still the case. Also, Google Analytics can see visited pages and Google uses it.
Finding domains is easy, everybody uses CTL to find them.
Nothing you enter into an LLM not hosted by you, or put onto the web is safe from being collected and exploited by these "AI" companies and their LLM's voracious appetite.
Google uses data from chrome. If you visited it with chrome, google knows it exists.
Isn't leaking browser extension used by one of people on the team (doesn't need to be developer, could be qa or anybody with whom the access was shared) more plausible?
You ISP also collects and sells data to companies like Moz, and possibly to Google too.
URL paths over https wouldn't be transparent to the ISP though, would they?
They would not - GP was probably bringing up something not directly relevant, but still related. (they should have clarified though)
Chat programs catch links you send.
Also that browser setting to check urls are safe sends them out “sometimes“.
Someone used Codex to scrape the ICM website schedule and discovered that the winners list was simply hidden in the front-end code with a "hidden" tag
This is on the devs and feels like a very basic leak which could have exploited in the non LLM world as well.
Well, the angle is kind of important here. The company gets their name in the news, they have a reasonable explanation why they were scraping around, and we end up with a story about innovative tech company whiz-kids who made a funny discovery, while it was the webdevs on the other side that goofed up.
Imagine a private individual just scraped the website (or simply clicked 'view source') for no reason in particular and then told people about it... They'd be labeled an uber-haxxor, face a civil lawsuit asking for ridiculous damages while being threatened with a prison sentence over CFAA violations. Hell, that might even drive some people to suicide.
The fact that an egregious case happened once, decades ago, is probably not sufficient grounding to act like every bit of equally trivial “hacking” always results in massively disproportionate law enforcement response.
Sucks it happened. But we all know that is not the typical scenario.
Yeah that happens all the time. Anyone/thing with popular public releases has fans/journeys scraping the website looking for unreleased material or scoops.
In the early days one of the high profile soaps in the UK published their "catch up" summaries for the week ahead which you could get just by editing the date in the URL. But back then not so many people were looking, so they were doing it for months...
Most of what an LLM does "could have" been done by a human if you throw enough human hours at it. But the reality in this circumstance is that a new tool helped find this leak. Saying this could have happened in a "non LLM world" is analogous to "someone else could have discovered special relativity, let's not mention Einstein"
This not only could have happened pre-llm, it did: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/02/report-missouri-governor...
twist: codex also wrote the code that placed the winners list in a hidden element
Related to the earlier discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902814
See also
Zhihu (Chinese Reddit): https://www.zhihu.com/question/2060133066643879544/answer/20...
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1urv4id/comment/oxak6...
This is sad, almost as sad as the Deathly Hallows pre-release leak.
too bad that those winners can no longer bet themselves on polymarket as the winner and make big money.
> Hong Wang will become the third female mathematician in history to receive the Fields Medal
Interestingly, if true, it will also be the first time an MIT PhD graduate has won the Fields Medal.
ai bots will have more privacy than we do
It's Wang Hong, my god. Cannot they still don't write proper Chinese names?
Wikipedia says Hong Wang while acknowledging that the native form is Wang Hong and that they are using the Western name order.
Nobody says Jinping Xi or Zedong Mao.
Can we not just agree that transliteration is tricky business with no single canon?
Some Indian restaurants near me sell Aloo Saag, others sell Alu Sag.
Well, some do say Jinping the Eleventh …
And Kim Jong the Second, which was confusing since he was actually the second Kim.
Is Elton John or Jhon Elton?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Wang
Such as waste of energy to argue on
> Cannot they still don't write
Amusing to see someone complaining about not using their definition of "proper language" when they themselves are not using proper language.