111–120 of 203 posts
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HTTPS encrypts the host? Thought you had to know where to go to open that secure transmission. It's enough for your ISP to know you went to "pornhub.com" for example.
They won't know when you use an alt DNS or DoH.
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Firefox has a browser.send_pings setting to control this, not sending any pings when it is set to false. This is explicitly a valid browser implementation of the ping attribute: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#hyperlink-... > 2. Optionally, return. (For example, the user agent might wish to ignore any or all ping URLs in accordance with the user's expressed preferences.) The problem isn't that Firef…
Exactly. That's why I solved this problem by using DDG. Although I admit some searches I have to send to Google to get the result I'm looking for.
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> Google search might have been good over a decade ago but today it's trash. IME, its still consistently far and away better than the alternatives. Part of the difference in perception of quality may be that over time it has come to use more personal signals to zero in on relevant results, and the people that complain about how bad it is overlap considerably with those who actively seek to deny those signals to Googl…
good point, that seems plausible. It's an unenviable choice though: good results from incessant surveillance (and nasty link re-writing per topic), or poor results if you use it infrequently. [I wouldn't know. I've been using DDG for so long now, I can't remember the last time I used Google search. Maybe I've forgotten how much better G is. Truth is, though, DDG does what I need of it. Rarely come away without the an…
There have been years since the last time I remember Google actually giving me better results than DDG (except when I only want product sellers, on this case there has been around an year).
Yes, maybe if I let Google see even more of my life, they would be able to get me better results. But they have access to much more than I'm comfortable with already, and the results aren't there.
It is really worth it to switch to DuckDuckGo. You can throw a g! at the end of your search if you don't like the results DDG gave and it will redirect you to Google. That was the feature that gave me the confidence to switch over, it's painless to get different results, even on a mobile keyboard.
It is really worth it to switch to DuckDuckGo. You can throw a g! at the end of your search if you don't like the results DDG gave and it will redirect you to Google. That was the feature that gave me the confidence to switch over, it's painless to get different results, even on a mobile keyboard.
DuckDuckGo also tracks what links you click on. Try it: when you click on a link you'll see an immediate ping to https://improving.duckduckgo.com/t/ ... (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
I stopped using Hangouts a long time ago because every link that was sent was wrapped in a redirect through Google. Sometimes that tracking service would be slow and I'd have to copy the links manually. Really infuriating.
Anyways, there is a big difference here. If I copy a link from Google I get [1] and if I copy a link from DDG I get [2].
1. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
I used to use “Google/Yandex Search Link Fix” but it died along with XUL https://github.com/palant/searchlinkfix
Google does this so they have click tracking data. But they don't need to mangle URLs in Chrome because it supports the `ping` attribute on tags [0]. The ping attribute basically adds click tracking as a native browser feature so you don't need to do URL redirects. It also makes these analytics much easier for the site and mysterious to the user. Looks like most vendors besides Firefox support it. (They were pretty o…
I see no cases when I, as a user, would want my broswer to support "ping" attribute. It's basically shady as fuck.
I bet anyone would prefer the ping method rather than the redirects we see on Firefox that mangle copied urls.
You seem to be of the opinion that no tracking would be better. And that's fine and a popular opinion around here. But that's not an option as Google relies heavily on the clicks as an input for ranking.
So in a context where you consider tracking HAS to happen ping does offer advantages for the user.
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Doesn't require running javascript, so presumably the devices could be more efficient in sending them versus XHR/fetch.
The article specifically says the offending pages used JavaScript to add the ping attribute to the tags, so the attack wouldn't have worked against users with JS disabled anyway.
https://news.ycombinator.com/" data-ved="2ahUKEwiIxrz0jKDzAhUWHcAKHQnnArkQFnoECAcQAx" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://news.ycombinator.com/&ved=2ahUKEwiIxrz0jKDzAhUWH...">
and this is how it looks like in Firefox:
https://news.ycombinator.com/" data-ved="2ahUKEwj9i67MjKDzAhXUfMAKHWJcCYsQFnoECA0QAx" onmousedown="return rwt(this,'','','','','AOvVaw3F-2xUE22tTvOxNDwVufx-','','2ahUKEwj9i67MjKDzAhXUfMAKHWJcCYsQFnoECA0QAx','','',event)">
You can see that Chromium based browsers call a ping endpoint whereas Firefox browsers use a mousedown event. This device detection uses the user agent; changing it on Firefox to look like Chrome results in a ping attribute instead of mousedown.
Google does this so they have click tracking data. But they don't need to mangle URLs in Chrome because it supports the `ping` attribute on tags [0]. The ping attribute basically adds click tracking as a native browser feature so you don't need to do URL redirects. It also makes these analytics much easier for the site and mysterious to the user. Looks like most vendors besides Firefox support it. (They were pretty o…
For Firefox, there's a relatively popular extension called ClearURLs that sanitizes most URLs to remove tracking, including Google's and Amazon's.
javascript:(function(){window.addEventListener("mousedown",(event)=>{event.stopImmediatePropagation();},true);})()