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Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#261

Post by Fnoord »

dylan604 wrote: post #193
geekamongus wrote: post #154

It seems that almost weekly, I am reminded why I love Firefox because of some new thing Mozilla is doing. A lot of good decisions have been coming from them lately.

FF is my primary browser, yet people I know that work in security laugh at me as they claim FF is always the first browser to fail in the hacker games. I don't know enough about why, but I'd love for that to not be a thing. Taking into account my threat profile (types of sites I visit, JS blocking, etc), I feel the hacking risk is still a worth while trade off for the lack of tracking.

"People I know that work in security" is vague and non descriptive.

To be fair, you did follow it up:

> as they claim FF is always the first browser to fail in the hacker games

What are their sources? I also "know such people" and I am unaware of such claims. If one uses Kali Linux, it has Mozilla Firefox as default browser. The same for Debian (on which Kali is based upon).

The thing is, you can harden your browser after installation. The first thing I do with a browser is installing uBlock Origin and uMatrix.

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#262

Post by pbhjpbhj »

clairity wrote: post #134
ChrisSD wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if HN users do want to try to lessen that percentage here's the donation page: https://donate.mozilla.org/

i wonder why mozilla hasn't tried a premium pricing model? the premium version of firefox could have a yearly subscription of, say, $24. it would have all privacy features turned on, the best privacy addons installed, and all analytics/telemetry turned off, by default. i would even pay a whole $3/month for that! =D

Because if they suggest anything to remove the whales then their paymasters will veto it?

The people who would pay for a subscription are surely some of the most valuable for advertising to, and FF in its current form exists because of advertising.

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#263

Post by visarga »

sebazzz wrote: post #221
dessant wrote: post #94

Google's reCAPTCHA makes it impossible to use large portions of the web once you take reasonable measures to protect your privacy. The challenge will continuously fail, despite you spending time to carefully solve it. This cruel behavior is described in a patent [1] by Kyle Adams of Juniper Networks. [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US9407661

Remember that reCAPTCHA v1 used to be noble: reading books and converting them to text. Now you're just training many Google machine learning algorithms by classifying data. In which they get more useful for the consumer, thus more powerful.

I hate them as much as you do, but you're wrong. Those storefront and traffic sign captchas are not useful for training ML models. If they were to be useful, they would be much more varied, like the original ones (used for OCR).

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#264

Post by drevil-v2 »

chrisshroba wrote: post #129
treve wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting a targeted advertising that is likely relevant to you is probably one of the few positives of tracking. The issue people have with tracking is not 'what ad am I getting on a given website'. To get a targeted ad they need to maintain a database of privacy infringing information. 3rd parties having this data, and what they might do it with it (or who they might lose the data to) is what many people have an issu…

Serious follow-up: I've always been fairly apathetic towards companies tracking me because I don't see too many plausible situations that would end up truly affecting me negatively. Do you have any examples (preferably that have happened in the past, but hypothetical are okay too) of what can go wrong if the tracking information falls in the wrong hands? Sure, street addresses, SSN's, credit card numbers would be bad…

You like Apple products and therefore you are a premium category customer. Dynamic pricing shown to you on websites will reflect that. Depending on the A/B rules in place you are paying a decent premium over someone with cheapo Android phone and looking for jobs in custodian services.

If you think that is fair then I have a lovely Harbour Bridge in Sydney that I think I get you a great deal on.

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#265

Post by ripdog »

godelski wrote: post #226
ademup wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has ~250M users as of about 9 months ago and $562M revenue for 2017. I'd honestly pay $2 per month (12 times "my share") for a Firefox that completely disavows the ad model and produces a truly user-centric experience sans ads, fingerprinting, etc. However, given that over 95% of their revenue comes from Royalties, I don't see that turning around any time soon.

They have a monthly subscription for donations[0]. You can't expect them to switch over until they meet a certain threshold. [0] https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/?utm_source=foundation.mozi...

Those donations go to supporting Mozilla Foundation's advocacy work, not Mozilla Corporation's work on Firefox.

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#266

Post by molf »

confounded wrote: post #245
kabacha wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's reCAPTCHA is cancer upon the web. Everyone should enable fingerprint block to shut this invasive and abusive garbage. If everyone would block it the website owners would have no choice other than to move to a different captcha system.

“Hm, works in Chrome. Are you using Chrome?”

This will become a less acceptable answer the more popular other browsers become.

The only way to make that happen is to stop using Chrome and tell others to do the same.

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#267

Post by CaptainZapp »

akerro wrote: post #252
skybrian wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, that makes sense. Not ideal, but captchas need to be written somehow.

Modern captchas are designed to be anti-human and use as for free training of their AI algorithms. We're slaves for free while Google benefits from this, both technologically and financially. Next captcha from google will be even more aggressive, you're not logged to Google = you're a bot, you can't access that content.

Next captcha from google will be even more aggressive, you're not logged to Google = you're a bot, you can't access that content.

You may be right. But you know what:

If I encounter captchas nowadays and unless I really need to get to that site it's "Fuck you very much!" time.

I'm just not that interested in most of the web to make it woth my while and provide free work for Google.

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#268

Post by pbhjpbhj »

derefr wrote: post #175
ngokevin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of funny though, the vast majority of Mozilla's money comes from the ads and tracking industry, just one step removed.

What’s wrong with using the resources of evil (freely given, oddly enough) to destroy evil? If someone you hate offers you a billion dollars, you should take it—because in doing so you’ve made someone you hate a billion dollars poorer! It’s like stealing the money from them, with less work! Imagine, analogously: a lottery whose proceeds go to a charity supporting statistics education.

If someone you hate gives you $1 million though, and says "I'll pay you again next year if you do well for me, you might even get more" then you're going to find that if you take the money in a few years all your decisions are centred around the happiness of the person you once hated.

If you keep taking their money you're morally complicit in their actions too.

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#269

Post by the_gipsy »

banachtarski wrote: post #53

Serious question. Suppose we have this. I suppose my expectation is that instead of seeing the same ad over and over again, now I'm seeing effectively a random one. Why is this necessarily better? I guess personally, I've always thought that regulating the content of the ads, rather than the usage of sufficiently anonymized data for ad targeting.

One case is targetting very precisely at people that could sway their vote.

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#270

Post by rplnt »

molf wrote: post #266
confounded wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Hm, works in Chrome. Are you using Chrome?”

This will become a less acceptable answer the more popular other browsers become. The only way to make that happen is to stop using Chrome and tell others to do the same.

"But you told me to use Chrome."

Google took over with shady practices, with the help of tech savvy people.

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