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Epic, The Privacy Browser

epicbrowser.com

121–130 of 130 posts

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I said anything about global disregard. I asked why I should personally care. It seems like there are a lot of people trying to tell me I should care, but I did not once say that others should not care.

Well the reasoning is quite simple actually, if you care for freedom then you should care for privacy. Without privacy there's no freedom possible. Maybe read some of the many posts around about privacy and freedom and rebuttal of the "I don't do anything wrong so I don't have to hide" argument: you could start with the schneier's blog: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_... But let me try to…

I've saved that article for reading later and I plan to respond when I've finished. Thanks for the link.

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I said anything about global disregard. I asked why I should personally care. It seems like there are a lot of people trying to tell me I should care, but I did not once say that others should not care.

Well the reasoning is quite simple actually, if you care for freedom then you should care for privacy. Without privacy there's no freedom possible. Maybe read some of the many posts around about privacy and freedom and rebuttal of the "I don't do anything wrong so I don't have to hide" argument: you could start with the schneier's blog: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_... But let me try to…

Well the reasoning is quite simple actually, if you care for freedom then you should care for privacy.

Sorry, but this sounds like the cr*p touted around by politicians and over zealous "patriots", along the lines of "if you don't support the war then you are not a patriot and therefore must support the terrorists".

Despite what most on HN would like to believe, outside of the tech community most people don't care about their privacy being invaded, and the OP is entitled to his opinion of not caring just as you (and I) are too overly caring. I believe that is the true definition of freedom, to be able to make ones own choice?

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#123

I see under the download button it says, 'more versions coming soon'...happen to know when us linux users will get some love?

Soon we hope...we LOVE linux!!!! We're also a bit paranoid about backdoors and use linux often ourselves...

From recent news, I doubt Linux (or any OS) is safe from that intrusion...

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#124
post #65

I find it a little suspicious that a browser that purports to be private gives a unique fingerprint on panopticlick... https://panopticlick.eff.org

I just checked myself and the identifying info for me was by a huge margin fonts & plugins. User Agent will become far less relevant if Epic gets more adoption and keeps a lock-step updating pattern. Perhaps as use of web fonts becomes more common perhaps it will become more feasible to send just a static list that's the same for all Epic users[1]. I suspect there's a potential cache-enumeration issue that would help tag browsers there, but I'm not sure.

As for plugins, that's a bit more difficult - I wouldn't mind an option to ask if I wanted to let a site enumerate plugins, but you start getting into header games & pointless reloads there if you're not careful.

[1] I force my own fonts for everything, so no UX issues for me. No idea how much of an issue it is for other folks.

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#125

I cringe when I read their claim to be "the first-ever privacy-focused browser built on chromium". Iron[1] was first released in 2008 to circumvent privacy issues with chrome. I wonder if they did a really poor job at researching what already exists and are truly clueless about iron, or if they outright lied for marketing purposes. Hopefully they're not clueless about privacy and are not lying about features, though…

SRware is focused on removing google stuff...not really privacy in general, at least from our view.

Re: Epic, The Privacy Browser

#130
post #65

I find it a little suspicious that a browser that purports to be private gives a unique fingerprint on panopticlick... https://panopticlick.eff.org

It mentions fingerprinting as a threat, but doesn't do anything specific against it. Probably because no one is quite sure how to stop it. From the FAQ: How does Epic protect against browser fingerprinting? There is no agreed-upon way to prevent browser fingerprinting or device fingerprinting at this point. There are many fingerprinting techniques which a solution would need to protect against. While we are working o…

Epic at present blocks tons of fingerprinting scripts. Comments above seem right to us as well that user-agent doesn't make sense to use from a fingerprinting perspective. Fonts+Plugins do though. We actually do and could've released things to protect against fingerprinting actively right now BUT it wouldn't have been comprehensive or defended against some of the key things we'd imagine a fingerprinter would use e.g. flash fonts call & more. So there's more work to be done - please join our forums and help us come up with more thorough solutions for fingerprinting.
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