thanks for the heads-up. My standard hourly rate is public (you can find it in the "hire me" section too), long term hires are then discussed on a per project basis. I actually didn't disclose how much they spent :)
I'm the author of the original article. I actually haven't posted it on HN and it was a pleasant surprise.
I believe the best way to "promote" yourself is by being active in your community. Connect with other developers, discuss on forums, groups, g+, etc...
Just logging in to push your open source project is pretty useless and quite lame. You have to be believable and you need to gain the trust of your community first. It's a long process but it pays back.
What if you have an open source project for which you can't easily find a community? For example, I've got what I feel is a fairly good backup utility as an upgrade for people using rsync snapshot backups. But it would feel improper to mention it on any rsync backup tool mailing list (as it technically competes with these tools).
The only thing I can think of is to make packages for various distributions and see if they want to include it. But I'd like to get a bit more testing and feedback first, with maybe a couple dozen users before going mainstream.
the experienced probably doesn't like your code and end up creating a new project that does the same thing and that will eventually die for lack of time/resources/will/...
I'm the (co)author of the project. Please note that it's just a one-day proof of concept, imagine what a well motivated corporation could do.
It's nothing new (someone correctly pointed the EFF project) but I wanted to make a real world demo out of it.
The demo doesn't store each bits of info separately, it simply creates an hash out of them. If I stored the data separately I could for example identify small user agent updates or screen resolution changes or newly installed plugins and so on.
Also, many of the info can be gathered without JS and actually browsing with NoJS puts you in a very restricted niche making you even more trackable ;)
The demo is far from perfect but I believe that even a 90% reliability is alarming. Anyway I'll put all the source code on Github for you to review. I hope to be able to add the NoScript code as well soon.
Just IP comparison only works if the user's IP is constant, which rules out many phones, tablets, and laptops that frequent coffee shops and restaurant wifi. It also doesn't allow you to tell when IP $a and IP $b are really the same person at home and work. Further, IP comparison doesn't let you distinguish between multiple users coming from the same home or office network, or from a proxy.
Commercial implementations of this sort of tracking include the user's IP in their dataset, but track a number of other datapoints so they can tell if e.g. everything but a user's IP matches an entry in their database, it's probably the same person connecting from a different location.
