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Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#181

Post by eulers_secret »

minikites wrote: post #49
awefasdfasdf wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read 'The age of surveillance capitalism'. Engineers should understand the business models they create.

Engineers don't respect any subject outside of STEM, education like this would fall on deaf ears.

I understand this knee-jerk reaction, but please don't judge engineers by what they post on HN. This place is... odd. (as I'm sure you know!)

If I formed my opinion only from HN, I'd think most engineers love: big-tech, advertising, electric cars, Apple, tech-enabled tracking (autos, web, cell-phone, watches, exercise machines, music players - it's ok if business profits!), and tend toward self-righteousness, narcissism, and virtue-signalling.

Of course, most of us are just living our lives and trying to get by. I don't know where this self-important insufferable attitude comes from, but I suspect it's a few folks who are very noisy. Most 'normal' people don't spend much time posting to sites like these, so there is a selection bias. Sadly, I also suspect that this attitude is an advantage in today's environment. It is a mirage of self-confidence, and telling the two apart can be very hard (especially for a potential employer).

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#182

Post by cactus2093 »

abcd_f wrote: post #68

Per-site caching negates the principal selling point of centrally-hosted JS and resources, including fonts. The convenience remains, but all speed-related perks (due to the resources being reused from earlier visits to unrelated sites) are no more... which is actually great, because it reduces the value that unscrupulous free CDN providers can derive from their "properties". It also means that I can remove fonts.goog…

It doesn't seem like centrally-hosted resources ever centralized enough to be all that useful. Even for sites that are trying to play ball, there are multiple CDNs so everyone has to agree which one is the standard. Plus everyone has to be using the same version of each resource, but in practice most js tools release so often that there will always be many different versions out in the wild.

On top of that a lot of the modern frontend tools and best practices are pushing in the other direction. Out of the box, tools like webpack will bundle up all your dependecies with your app code. The lack of JS namespacing and desire to avoid globals (which is pretty well-intentioned, and generally good advice) means that your linter complains when you just drop in a script tag to pull a library from a cdn instead of using an es6 import and letting your bundler handle it. Typescript won't work out of the box I don't think. Your integration tests will fail if the cdn is down or you have a network hiccup, as opposed to serving files locally in your test suite. And on and on. This is just anecdotal, but I haven't seen most teams I've worked with value the idea of centrally-hosted JS enough to work around all these obstacles.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#183

Post by vianneychevalie »

Average_ wrote: post #141
ogre_codes wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just have a decent set of ad blockers and the experience is similar. Unfortunately, it often results in weird experiences or I get sites which don't work at all if you have ad blocking.

Well that's interesting. For me 99.5% of websites work perfectly using ublock origin. The only .5% remaining are websites that actively refuse to serve any kind of adblock users, not because it breaks functionality on their site. I don't think I can recall having visited a single website that would have features break unintentionally because of ublock in the past few years.

Can't agree with you, Dynamics 365 is one of them (it's shit but I've implemented it at work). EDF (French main electricity provider) also breaks for me. That's one example from a big company, and one example with a big user base.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#184

Post by spacedgrey »

pradn wrote: post #101
warent wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a network ad-block dns (pihole) and consistently 25-33% of all my network traffic is blocked as ads. It's much more than I ever imagined. Now I'm used to a different internet, when I'm using internet off the network it's like WTF is this?

Question about pihole: is it possible to turn off blocking for a website? Do you have to log into the pihole web interface to do that? I often go to websites where some crucial functionality is blocked by my adblocker (ublock origin), where I have to turn it off for that site.

I map the command below to a keyboard shortcut to disable all pihole blocking for 60 seconds via the pihole disable API call.

wget --quiet "http://PIHOLE_IP/admin/api.php?disable=60&auth=YOUR_API_TOKE..."

You can find the token in the pihole Web GUI at, Settings > API/Web Interface > Show API token

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#185

Post by GuB-42 »

biryani_chicken wrote: post #120
pradn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question about pihole: is it possible to turn off blocking for a website? Do you have to log into the pihole web interface to do that? I often go to websites where some crucial functionality is blocked by my adblocker (ublock origin), where I have to turn it off for that site.

I just stop using sites that gimp themselves when I use an adblocker. There's tons of alternatives for most things.

It is not what GP asked.

An no, there isn't "tons of alternatives". In theory there is. But in practice, they can really make your life harder. Some may say that Signal is an alternative for WhatsApp, but if people you communicate with don't want to use anything but WhatsApp, then Signal is useless. I hate Facebook but when I want to plan an event, I found nothing better, simply because that's the platform that reaches the most people. Network effects... But also, your favorite show may not be on "alternative" streaming platforms, sometimes your job, or worse, the government may require a specific website.

There are extremists who are ready to find alternative friends, shows or jobs just to avoid using some website. It is a good thing these people exist, that's how progress is made. But for most people you have to make compromises.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#186

Post by chromaton »

zinekeller wrote: post #163
chromaton wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I agree. Do you have more information about how iOS is blocking fingerprinting?

While it has some native anti-fingerprinting protection (including automatically deleting third-party cookies every week), the main deterrent is homogeneity: you can be sure that the browser/device is Safari on iPhone 12 Pro Max... and that's it. In other words, unlike other devices where you can get what GPU is in the system (WebGL and Canvas), the resolution of the screen, the list of fonts installed by the user (i…

I found this:

https://9to5mac.com/2020/09/04/ad-industry-tracking/

"my iPhone 11 Pro was also unique among the more than 2.5 million devices they have tested."

Time zone is one possible fingerprint data point.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#187

Post by ericholscher »

ogre_codes wrote: post #48

These advertising networks are destroying web performance. Most of these "Supercookies" are optimizations to improve performance. By abusing them, advertisers have turned what should be a great performance tool into a liability. I know FF suggests this won't significantly affect most websites performance, but web advertising and trackers are already responsible for a huge chunk of performance issues already. Of cours…

We're trying to build an ad network that doesn't track users: https://www.ethicalads.io/

We talked a little bit about how these ads still work, even without tracking you. You might be losing 10-15% of revenue, but if you never had that revenue to start with, you don't miss it: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2018/04/ethical-advertising-w...

I think the real secret is just to not become dependent on the additive revenue. All businesses forgo additional revenue based on ethics and regulation, and I don't understand why that's such a odd thing to do with advertising.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#188

Post by buzzy_hacker »

newscracker wrote: post #91

Use uBlock Origin, Multi Account Containers, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes and CookieAutoDelete with Firefox. Make sure you aggressively clear cache, cookies, etc., periodically (with CookieAutoDelete). You’ll probably load the web servers more and also add more traffic on your network, but it will help protect your privacy since most websites don’t care about that. When websites are user hostile, you have to take pr…

Agree, but substituting multi-account containers with temporary containers https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#189

Post by andai »

makecheck wrote: post #89
ogre_codes wrote: post #48

These advertising networks are destroying web performance. Most of these "Supercookies" are optimizations to improve performance. By abusing them, advertisers have turned what should be a great performance tool into a liability. I know FF suggests this won't significantly affect most websites performance, but web advertising and trackers are already responsible for a huge chunk of performance issues already. Of cours…

Modern ad networks are essentially the “fax machine flyers” of old: someone you don’t know using your resources and your time, denying you use of your own resources temporarily, to send you something you don’t want. Except now it’s like every “normal” fax page includes 15,000 flyers.

Some pages don't let you "Reject All" cookies, you have to uncheck them one by one, and there's literally hundreds of ad networks listed.

It's spooky, I tell ya!

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#190

Post by hinkley »

StLCylone wrote: post #96
f430 wrote: post #77

is it just me or more people switching to Firefox these days?

On the desktop there has been minor movement as percentage of the whole market, but up 9% on their own share. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

Chrome is losing market share since October? What changed?
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