431–440 of 450 posts
Thanks firefox. Not. One of the last truly shiny examples of open source is losing the plot. Not only that it requires pulseaudio (alsa?), it is getting harder and harder to use it normally with FreeBSD. Now this. I've had enough, testing links -g and it works well for most of my browsing needs.
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It’s a question of consent. Imagine I came to your house, and photocopied all your documents. Don’t worry, I blanked out the name, so it’s completely anonymous, and everything is where it used to be. Would you be okay with that? I certainly wouldn’t. Making this opt-in or opt-out is a question of consent, and choosing opt-out shows that you don’t give a flying fuck about me, and only want your own benefit.
If you continue to post uncivil comments to HN we are going to ban you. You've had many more warnings than usual. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There is a swearword used, but it’s not in the context in any way uncivil, as the plural "you" that it is referring to is an abstract person, a hypothetical entity – not any actually involved person. (In this case, the potential future group of people at Mozilla who might decide to override an explicit choice I made for their own convenience)
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Why? No, seriously; why? I don't get this mentality at all. Let's ignore the exact implementation here for a moment, and assume that Firefox is somehow magically doing this data collection in such a way that it is guaranteed the data collected cannot be traced back to you as an individual. (E.g. "sufficiently anonymous".) What problem do you have with that, specifically? How does this harm you in any way?
And I don't get the mentality where I should justify why I don't want my tools to report what I am doing. I'm ok with testing things and sending feedback, but when I switch to a production environment, I just want my tools to behave like my tools, not the testing farm for somebody else. Why should I prove to you that it would harm me? I just do not want it, it should be enough.
Obviously that's ridiculous, right? If the default setting was to not seed, torrent clients would be much less useful for everyone involved. Browsers sending usage stats are much the same way. While no individual user benefits from _their machine_ sending those statistics, it's better for the user population as a whole if the default setting is to send them, since those stats help the browser vendor build a better browser. (And before you cry "privacy", remember that in this context we're talking about a situation where the statistics are being sent in a way that is "sufficiently anonymous" such that privacy isn't an issue. See the GP.)
So while I agree you certainly should have the right to disable sending usage statistics if you wish (just as many Torrent clients let you disable seeding), expecting that to be the default setting is a bit strange.
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> No phoning home. No telemetry, no data collection. No "light" version of the same, no "privacy-respecting" what-have-you. No means No. Nada. Zilch. Try and shovel any of that down people's throats and the idea of Firefox as a user's browser will die. https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785 And now this :-( I have been using Firefox since before it was called that. I develop my apps in it, even though…
Even worse, in that discussion, it appears that there's a backdoor built into Firefox so that WebExtension-based ad blockers can't block Google Analytics. Only old-style add-ons can block it. "It's as if the order to block/redirect the network request was silently ignored by the webRequest API, and this causes webext-based blockers to incorrectly and misleadingly report to users what is really happening internally."…
There are probably security reasons why add-ons can't modify about:add-ons. Imagine an add-on that could hide itself by modifying that page.
Please don't spread FUD.
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> Firefox should make this feature opt-in only. I agree, but note that they are explicitly trying to get more info than they can from the small, biased sample that is users opting in.
They claim is biased but is it really biased? How do they know? I think this is just making up excuses so they can collect more data. They get good enough data from the people that have volunteered it. I don't know what makes them think it's biased but I seriously doubt that is true.
Informed, constructive opinion there.
One clear sign of the bias is that the crash rate of the browser goes up massively every time a new version transforms from beta to release. Clearly, it's not renaming that string that makes the browser crash. The populations are just fundamentally different.
To give an obvious example, beta users are overwhelmingly more like to have up to date video drivers. (Which can be seen in crash reports, but is also very logical).
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That's not how it works. Most users don't care and will simply use whatever the default is; and when it comes to anonymous usage statistics, "most users" is _exactly_ the group of people you want to be collecting them from; otherwise your results will be skewed heavily in favor of a small minority of power users.
Why would optimising for the power users be wrong though? In most cases if it's good enough for the power users who tend to break things more often than regular people it is perfect for the regular users. Quite the opposite if the focus too much on the regular users they might get too much noise and never notice issues in the more complex features that only power users tend to use. You want the heavy users of your pr…
Former Opera people can tell a few stories there.
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> I'm assuming there will always be an opt out which I shall add to my list of things I have to do when installing Firefox. There will be. Sorry for the hassle :(
How can I recommend my friends to use Firefox when I know they wont remember to opt out?
I'm not sure I like that gamble.
By now people should be aware that it is not just the content that is important, but also the metadata. A browser that phones home with information on users' browsing habits is not acceptable to many of us, who will move to forks or a different browser altogether. This from one of the people who "doesn't complain, but just never goes back."
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They wouldn't know that you are visiting it, just that someone is visiting it.
How can they not know that I'm visiting it? I mean, the data is coming from my IP address. Sure, they may be dropping that data before storage. But what if it's intercepted?
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From the OP, one suggestion is to collect "top-level+1 domains". This don't solve the issue of a person going to "starting_a_union_inside_company_x.com", which would be a top-level domain. Niche domains don't have a large number of users and as such the users can be trivial to deanonymized. It is also rather common that domain name servers have a private and public side. Firefox could easily become a vector of leakin…
Even Alexa 1k could be quite sensitive, for example there are many porn sites in that list.
EDIT: Don't forget that the DNS resolution for porn sites can be deanonymized and resold by your internet provider - there's nothing we can do to protect you from DNS being a cleartext, sniffable, mitm'able protocol.