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Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

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Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#351

Post by marvinblum »

jb1991 wrote: post #333

Can anyone explain the fingerprinting issue, unrelated to cookies. Visit any one of these many sites that show you what your browser knows about you, it doesn’t matter if using Firefox with fingerpring blocking enabled, the site reveals a tremendous amount of information in your fingerprint. Firefox doesn’t stop any of that, despite its settings that purport to do so. It's always the same information, not scrambled o…

Which actually makes sense. If you have a "zero-fingerprint" browser it will become useless, because you cannot use any advanced features other than displaying HTML.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#352

Post by etiam »

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.

There are plenty of categories of human for which this community would not stand for an overly broad, coarse generalization like that.

Personally I'm not even convinced your claim is effective as a prejudice. What I'll concede is many engineers I've met seem to be harsher than average on pseudoscience och some varieties of manipulative lies, but that's to be expected as they have distinguishing knowledge for such things to clash with.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#353

Post by coliveira »

pants-no-pants wrote: post #238
mstade wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many people reading this comment are thinking, "what's a fax machine?" :o) I like the analogy, but I wonder how effective it is on anyone under the age of what, 35?

My bank still accepts fax documents. All I would have to do is find a fax machine ...

In the Apple store you can find apps that send fax to a physical location. That's what I used the last time I had to send one.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#354

Post by jb1991 »

marvinblum wrote: post #351
jb1991 wrote: post #333

Can anyone explain the fingerprinting issue, unrelated to cookies. Visit any one of these many sites that show you what your browser knows about you, it doesn’t matter if using Firefox with fingerpring blocking enabled, the site reveals a tremendous amount of information in your fingerprint. Firefox doesn’t stop any of that, despite its settings that purport to do so. It's always the same information, not scrambled o…

Which actually makes sense. If you have a "zero-fingerprint" browser it will become useless, because you cannot use any advanced features other than displaying HTML.

What I mean is, the fingerprint that is sent to any of these sites accurately describes my machine, and FF never attempts to hide or scramble that information despite its anti-fingerprint setting.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#356

Post by notsureaboutpg »

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.

There's a huge difference though, people didn't use fax machines to access loads of quality content for free.

Things aren't free, but the Internet makes us feel like those things are, and then when the creators of the content we consume for free attempt to receive their pay, we call ad networks shady and shifty and cheating. There are huge problems with ad networks, but they are feeding and providing for lots and lots of content creators in a way we, as the general public, aren't willing to do.

Complex situation with complex answers...

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#357

Post by emayljames »

michaelmior wrote: post #343
grishka wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use your browser settings to block third-party cookies altogether. And, better yet, install uBlock Origin and never see an ad again.

> never see an ad again I wish that were true. Although uBlock Origin does a good job, some ads definitely still make it through. There are also some sites that detect ad blockers and refuse to let you in unless you disable it. There are workarounds for some of these, but it's still a bit of a mess.

I agree, although to add, uBlock Origin has an 'annoyances' list that does a pretty good job of stopping detectors.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#358

Post by sbarre »

michaelmior wrote: post #343
grishka wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use your browser settings to block third-party cookies altogether. And, better yet, install uBlock Origin and never see an ad again.

> never see an ad again I wish that were true. Although uBlock Origin does a good job, some ads definitely still make it through. There are also some sites that detect ad blockers and refuse to let you in unless you disable it. There are workarounds for some of these, but it's still a bit of a mess.

If a website doesn't let me in because I use an ad blocker, I respect their decision and I leave the site and find what I need elsewhere.

I have yet to come across a site that offered something so unique or compelling that I decided to turn off my ad blocker to use it.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#359

Post by rgossiaux »

daotoad wrote: post #256
secondcoming wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

allowlist/denylist

Why are people being so negative about this? If the terms whitelist/blacklist are hurtful to some people because of all the racial baggage we've applied to the words white and black, why not switch to allow/deny instead? Using allow/deny is more explicit and doesn't rely on the benign cultural associations with the colors black and white. The choice of colors used here is arbitrary. For example, one could just as eas…

>objectively clearer terminology

Sorry but I find this claim (which I've heard from others too) ridiculous. "Blacklist" is an actual common English word in the dictionary. "Denylist" is an incredibly awkward-sounding neologism without any context or history behind it. There is no way that "denylist" is the "objectively clearer" one here.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#360

Post by alfalfasprout »

floatingatoll wrote: post #322
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…

Doing this will make it trivially easy to fingerprint and track you on the web, as the set of people who use non-defaults like this list is 0.000001% of the total possible user space for their area, and your IP address probably only changes rarely or never A better way to protect yourself is to use a browser with tracking protections on by default, and leave the settings alone. You may see a few more ads but you’ll b…

If you live in the Bay Area chances are plenty of others do the same thing.
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