I'm sure that many of you have heard about this: http://panopticlick.eff.org/
It's a way to form a somewhat unique fingerprint of a web site visitor based on information about their browser, fonts, plugins, etc...
Does anyone know of a library (python!?) to do this?
I'd like to allow for visitors to vote on a poll without having to have an account...
You could get jQuery to send that data to your server, and garner the rest on receipt of that request from HTTP headers.
Create a checksum, bish-bash-bosh done.
warning as much of that information is JS provided (this also applies to the user agent) it is very easily manipulated. If you have a single hash, I only have to change one small value (like browser version) to get a new vote.
Sounds dangerous ... why not just use logins like everyone else, it's easy with OpenID nowadays.