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EFF Publishes Study On Browser Fingerprinting
Rubinstien writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation investigated the degree to which modern web browsers are susceptible to 'device fingerprinting' via version and configuration information transmitted to websites. They implemented one possible algorithm, and collected data from a large sample of browsers visiting their Panopticlick test site, which we've discussed in the past. According to the PDF describing the study, browsers that supported Flash or Java on average supplied at least 18.8 bits of identifying information, and 94.2% of those browsers were uniquely identifiable in their sample. My own browser was uniquely identifiable from both the list of plugins and available fonts, among 1,557,962 browsers tested so far."
If you read the article they write that it's trivial to track users despite minor fingerprint changes. Page 13 of the PDF.
15.21 and 1:38023
The UA and HTTP_ACCEPT headers provided most of the bits, and those will be pretty common for anyone using the same browser version and platform. NoScript blocked most of the other detection techniques, and those results will be common with anyone else using NoScript or with JavaScript disabled.