Live data from Hacker News

Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

blog.mozilla.org

11–20 of 246 posts

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#13

I do appreciate the feature! But how feasible would be to limit the amount of info retrievable from the JS layer instead than relying on a black list of domains serving fingerprinters?

Depends what sites you’re ok with breaking. Users will blame the browser if it works in chrome but not firefox

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#15
The only problem that keeps me from entirely supporting Firefox / Mozilla is that they had to be so vitriolic in opposing someone's right to their own opinions and beliefs. The time they got rid of Brendan Eich still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The irony of calling yourself "free and open".

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#16

I am not trying to diminishing this post, just want to point out that a great way to increase adoption would be to make a better and simpler-looking UI. A great deal of users prefer Chrome for this reason.

> The average user doesn't even know about fingerprinting

Yet. Give it one or two scandals, maybe involving a heavyweight like Reddit, and users will be aware of what fingerprinting is and why it's not in their interest to have their digital fingerprints taken, analyzed and stored every time they enter the internet equivalent of a grocery store. Give them analogies they can understand and they will feel like they're in a dystopian surveillance state movie, because that's what we're in on the internet.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#17
post #2

Kind of a shame that I can't browse that site using a VPS on a tier-2 VPS provider (Vultr)

Can you elaborate on why you cannot browse that site? From your comment it is not clear to me what the problem is but it reads as if you are trying to blame mozilla.

Most often I get a 403 forbidden

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#20
post #6

Seems like they're just using a blacklist? Those seem to be able to be gamed pretty trivially.

Agreed. Setting up blacklists is just whack-a-mole. I'd be more interested in detection of actual fingerprinting techniques, such as system font enumeration using canvas, or WebGL GPU fingerprinting. It would be technically possible to detect the creation of WebGL or canvas contexts that aren't actually rendered in the layout and prevent data gathered from those contexts from being sent in any XHR payload. I'm sure t…

I couldn't help but read the headline and think to myself: This is great! I should probably jump right in to this .001 % bucket of Firefox nightly users. Combined this with my >1% OS, custom profile of barebones unsupported, blocked, not installed client technologies and then they'll really never get my fingerprints!
Post reply on HN