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Ask HN: Firefox connection problems after enabling DoH?

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Re: Ask HN: Firefox connection problems after enabling DoH?

#292

I've found that AppArmor started to block Firefox: audit: type=1400 audit(1642063521.864:246): apparmor="DENIED" operation="ptrace" profile="snap.firefox.firefox" pid=9868 comm="Shutdow~minator" requested_mask="trace" denied_mask="trace" peer="snap.firefox.firefox" I really don't like it, but turning off Apparmor worked for me. Not sure what caused AppArmor to start complaining all of a sudden.

Your policy is blocking ptrace from processes that don't seem like they should need ptrace (very few processes need ptrace). So why would Firefox need ptrace? Some cursory googling suggests that ptrace is used for plugins and by the crash reporter. There are apparmor profiles for Firefox, e.g. this one: https://github.com/nibags/apparmor-profiles/blob/master/appa... Maybe you could add it to your system and see if th…

This seems to fix it, even though there was already a default apparmor config for Firefox (which looked _very_ familiar).

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Firefox connection problems after enabling DoH?

#293
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disable telemetry while you're at it: "Firefox Data Collection and Use" in settings. It seems to have re-enabled itself on some silent update. Sneaky bastards.

I was surprised to find I had telemetry enabled. I could have sworn I disabled it, but it would have been a long time ago, so I was thinking maybe I remember it wrong. I would like to see any source that may exist on it having been silently re-enabled. I know telemetry is anonymized and totally harmless or whatever, but re-enabling it behind my back would feel like such a breach of trust.

I keep a careful log of such stuff and I'm 100% sure that I disabled it on all machines here. This definitely got re-enabled silently at some point, I am trying to figure out when. Not having such crap is the reason I use Firefox so it is hard to express my disappointment at this.

Re: Ask HN: Firefox connection problems after enabling DoH?

#294

I was wondering what that was about... Seems like I'm disabling automatic updates for the foreseeable future.

Auto-updates had nothing to do with it, in this case it was a pre-existing bug in Firefox's HTTP3 implementation getting triggered by new changes to load balancers in front of Firefox's data collection servers.

Re: Ask HN: Firefox connection problems after enabling DoH?

#295
post #123

I love Firefox. It's depressing to see the hate they're getting in the comments.

It's depressing what Mozilla did to Firefox.

I was and still am an evangelist but stuff like this makes me wonder.

Never saw a bug like this in a browser. By pure chance did I check if Chrome worked.

Re: Ask HN: Firefox connection problems after enabling DoH?

#296
Interesting. My partner had this problem (?) or something just like it just now on her Windows machine, but my assumption was that this was a firewall problem (Windows defender had different firewall settings for Firefox as opposed to Chrome and Edge). Setting a single check mark fixed this.

Re: Ask HN: Firefox connection problems after enabling DoH?

#297
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was perfectly happy with the one that didn't support this 'feature', and automatic updates are what brought it to my system.

Yeah, the alternative is running a system with a ton of outdated software, with known bugs and active exploits while casually surfing the "oh-so-cosy-and-entirely-harmless" WWW... The goal is not to ostracize automatic updates, but to have faster fixes. Or to separate security updates from feature updates, but I think this ship has long sailed for modern browsers.

The goal is to fully control your environment and not to expecting some unexpected updates.

User is the one who must choose update policy. If user is choosing to not update then it's their own problem and no manufacturer has the right to deside otherwise.

Re: Ask HN: Firefox connection problems after enabling DoH?

#300

So, looking at the HTTP3 wikipedia page I see this: "HTTP/3 uses QUIC, a transport layer network protocol which uses user space congestion control over the User Datagram Protocol (UDP)." Ok. Is it still a thing with internet core routers that in case of congestion issues they drop datagram packets because they're not guaranteed to be delivered anyway?

Internet routers do not differentiate between TCP/UDP. They do drop IP packets when congestion occurs (regardless what's inside).
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