Weird Web October #11: API

Did you know that HTTP is an API? It's true! Everytime you visit a website, your browser sends a HTTP request to some server.

Here's the request that your computer sent to my server when you visited this page.

{
    "URL": "/wwo24/api/weirdweboctober",
    "Protocol": "HTTP/2.0",
    "Method": "GET",
    "IP Address": "3.147.73.85",
    "Referer": "",
    "Body": "",
    "Headers": {
        "Accept": [
            "*/*"
        ],
        "Accept-Encoding": [
            "gzip, br, zstd, deflate"
        ],
        "User-Agent": [
            "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)"
        ]
    },
    "Cookies": "[]"
}

This may seem like gobbledygook to you, so let's break down some of the more interesting information!


So yeah, there's a brief overview of some of the info that web servers collect when you visit their website.

In the day to day, none of it is too damaging, but it's good to be aware of all the same. And in the aggregate, at large scale, it allows ad companies (Google, Facebook) to track us across the web.

VPNs can be used to hide your IP and make it harder to track you. Just be careful about which VPN you sign up for, because they get all the info the webserver's normally do.

To end on a happy note though... here's the Cookie Monster!

Click to stop gif