Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 246 posts

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

#191

Post by sneak »

roca wrote: post #188
hanniabu wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thoughts on Brave browser?

Brave's good but since it's a wrapper around Chromium, you're still supporting Google control over the Web.

This sort of reasoning is fallacious. Use of Chrome’s renderer is not specifically advantageous to Google until/unless they attempt to leverage it to break web standards, which is not their general policy (Widevine concessions to content creators notwithstanding), just as use of WebKit is not specifically advantageous to Apple, nor is Node’s use of v8, et c.

Fact is, Brave is, as I understand it, a system that intends to pay a user to see ads (via replacement) - although they may have pivoted (again?) away from that. It’s not an anti-tracking or anti-advertising effort.

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

#192

Post by [deleted] »

manigandham wrote: post #174
bravoetch wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case the clue is the word fingerprinting. If someone outside your door was taking fingerprint impressions, your name, and then writing down your license plate and selling that info to anyone with money - would you just let that continue? Unlikely.

In the real world they can't physically touch you so let's replace that with passive facial recognition. In that case, yes they can do that all today. Someone can follow you all day from the moment you step out into public. We might not like it but it is legal and they own their observations.

[deleted]

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

#193

Post by microtonal »

Aeolun wrote: post #159
elagost wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had this happen frequently because my configuration really aggressively blocks this stuff. It's bad enough that I have a separate browser (Gnome Web aka Epiphany) just for logging into and using sites that have Captcha, like Pocket and Bandcamp, and I do everything else in Firefox. Captcha is horrible. I understand why sites use it, but putting a Google-wall in front of your content is a very bad idea.

The problem is not the wall itself, but that Google uses it’s de-facto monopoly position to enforce tracking.

Plus creating image recognition training data for them. I am not interested in working for Google. Not paid, let alone for free.

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

#194

Post by lame88 »

sneak wrote: post #190
gcb0 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not to mention when google puts you in captcha-hell-ban. often, after a few difficult ones, I realize I get stuck into the same 20 challenges. over and over. no matter if I get them rigth or not. We do run all browser in the office with figerprint protection on and run non-exit-tor-nodes in all offices. But those are hardly excuses. The hell bans happens more often on firefox for android, but I guess that is what you…

No, it’s the site owner choosing to outsource their decisions about gatekeeping a private site to Google. Google isn’t censoring you via CAPTCHA, the site owner is.

Lol sure, and “guns don’t kill people; people kill people”

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

#195

Post by kevingrahl »

jlrubin wrote: post #124
jakubp wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are happier to have your resources stolen and not be aware of it (it's invisible, you can't see what's happening and react - right?) than to be shown an annoying thing which is very much in your awareness? I don't know, I'd rather know someone is harming me silently and have the means to stop it by default. The things that are shown in front of me, I can handle them...

Firefox already has tools to throttle tabs which are abusive CPU-load wise, which seems sufficient in this case. And it's unclear such resources are being 'stolen' if it's stated in the site ToS. Cryptocurrency mining is a lot less deleterious than ads. Mining doesn't need to track your behavior, it doesn't generate misleading native content, and it doesn't distract you from what you're trying to do. Sign me up! disc…

> And it’s unclear such resources are being ‘stolen’ if it’s stated in the sites ToS.

Unless I, as a user, explicitly consented to crypto mining, no such thing should be allowed to take place. Same thing goes for auto playing videos.

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

#196

Post by ENGNR »

the-pigeon wrote: post #150
Spare_account wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who're trying to avoid being fingerprinted are probably thinking of Google when they decided to go down this path. I'm willing to go through extensive captcha cycles if that's the cost of retaining some anonymity. I installed uMatrix a while back to recover some anonymity and it worked at first, my Captcha load spiked significantly which was a great indication that I'd succeeded but it has dropped over tim…

At this point can I just pay for a certificate or something? Like for $1 give me a certificate that I can use to say "I'm not a spammer" and I can anonymously buy as many certificates as I want. And then if a certificate is used by a spammer it becomes invalid. Seems like it's expensive enough to be worth using for existing spammers but let normal people pay a $1 every year or two to not have to deal with captchas.

Even just proof that 5c worth of crypto or something was burned would would a good alternative. Let the site/app designer work out how often it needs to happen (maybe just the first few times if they're new) to stop spam and not cost honest users much

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

#197

Post by l0b0 »

sneak wrote: post #190
gcb0 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not to mention when google puts you in captcha-hell-ban. often, after a few difficult ones, I realize I get stuck into the same 20 challenges. over and over. no matter if I get them rigth or not. We do run all browser in the office with figerprint protection on and run non-exit-tor-nodes in all offices. But those are hardly excuses. The hell bans happens more often on firefox for android, but I guess that is what you…

No, it’s the site owner choosing to outsource their decisions about gatekeeping a private site to Google. Google isn’t censoring you via CAPTCHA, the site owner is.

That is only true as far as the site owner knows of and understands the consequences of their actions. I would be extremely surprised if more than 10% of their users understand this. Whether they care is a whole other matter, but this is very likely ignorance rather than malice on the part of site owners.

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

#198

Post by sroussey »

vkou wrote: post #143
fxbl0i wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controversial != useless. I don't like they wasted money on Firefox OS or Persona; I don't want to donate to them if my money goes there instead of to Firefox. In fact, why not let us decide where exactly our money will go if we donate?

Mozilla invested into Firefox OS, because they were hoping to disentangle their #1 revenue stream from ad-tech companies.

It also led to the sharp decline in memory usage as that became super obvious when they went 100% mobile.

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

#199

Post by sroussey »

Aeolun wrote: post #163
dahfizz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time believing a paid browser would ever get big. People just do not care enough.

If Jetbrains were to build a browser on top of firefox with a similar level of features to their IDE’s, I would absolutely pay for that. Developer tools is already invaluable, but there’s no reason it cannot be better.

Very few people pay/donate, and very few did for Firebug back in the day.

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

#200

Post by Tsubasachan »

4mitkumar wrote: post #69
jacekm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like to see more security around the data that is used for fingerprinting, such as user agent I think this is already available, just not enabled by default. In about:config one need to set privacy.resistFingerprinting to true. (be aware however that this setting causes problems with google captcha - the number of challenges that you will need to solve will drastically increase)

> this setting causes problems with google captcha - the number of challenges that you will need to solve will drastically increase No kidding. I'm talking about ~30-40 clicks (1 click per task in the captcha grid)

Yeah I use multiple browsers. One that is completely locked down and one for CAPTCHA. The internet is hostile to anonymity.
Post reply on HN