Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HTTP "Prefer:Safe" – Making Online Safety Simpler in Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 62 posts

Re: HTTP "Prefer:Safe" – Making Online Safety Simpler in Firefox

#31

Post by icebraining »

kijin wrote: post #20

I wonder how they're going to implement the "no circumvention" part. Surely there's an option in about:config that affects the new behavior? Is about:config disabled too? There are also dozens of add-ons that lets you control every single header. Are add-ons disabled too, or is there going to be a blacklist of header-modifying add-ons? It will take less than a week for point-and-click circumvention tools to become av…

It will take less than a week for point-and-click circumvention tools to become available all over the place. Just download this little .EXE that makes a small change to your Firefox profile and might or might not also contain malware!

This is supposed be activated by Windows Parental Controls, which already allow you to block the user from running unknown .exe files.

Re: HTTP "Prefer:Safe" – Making Online Safety Simpler in Firefox

#32

Post by user24 »

darklajid wrote: post #25

Soooo.. This is sending "Hey, this is a kid on a restricted machine" to all servers now? I mean I fail to understand the original idea, obviously. It makes no sense to me. But I question the value of the above - basically now the server can _just as easily_ do crap with that information. You can now identify minors (using that feature). Beautiful. The server operators cannot decide what 'parental control' would mean…

Agreed; "The server operators cannot decide what 'parental control' would mean for parents" is the most important part, for me.

There are as many definitions of "what is appropriate for kids to see" as there are parents.

The decision belongs with the parents, not with the 3rd party sites who, let's not forget, are the ones supplying the content in the first place.

This just seems like an utterly naive and vague idea.

Re: HTTP "Prefer:Safe" – Making Online Safety Simpler in Firefox

#33

Post by user24 »

indeyets wrote: post #22
rurounijones wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Citation Needed] Spec makes no mention of age groups this is supposed to be used for aside from "children".

It is a matter of common sense. You can't reasonably control internet usage of teenager (and probably shouldn't). While 5yo is an avid user YouTube and google and it is a good idea to filter things they can get to

I would say that the answer for the 5 year old scenario is supervision.

Re: HTTP "Prefer:Safe" – Making Online Safety Simpler in Firefox

#34

Post by dimman »

Karunamon wrote: post #4

Sounds like a great way for kids to learn how HTTP debugging proxies work.

Was just gonna say that; "Users won’t find any UI in Firefox to enable or disable Prefer:Safe, which becomes one less thing for kids to try to circumvent to disable this control."

That's good, make them hackers instead by making them implement their own HTTP-proxy :)

Re: HTTP "Prefer:Safe" – Making Online Safety Simpler in Firefox

#35

Post by bostik »

chc wrote: post #8
chimeracoder wrote: post #6

I have to say, I don't really care much for this, and I'm surprised to see it coming from Mozilla. "Prefer:Safe" is rather vague-sounding. I was expecting something about incorporating something like "HTTPS Everywhere" into Firefox. I understand the appeal of something to prevent kids from stumbling across porn or violence online, but let's not muddy words like "trust" (which mean something very different when talkin…

I think the idea isn't so much a porn filter as it is a "treat this user as a child" request. So, for example, social networking sites might work in restricted mode. I do agree "prefer safe" is a very poor way of expressing that desire, though. Maybe "child-safe", but not just "safe", which implies a related but different idea.

If this takes off at all, I can see the sites reacting by altering the advertising group selection based on the presence of the header.

"Cool, an under-10 browsing. Let's push all the autoplay toy videos we have in rotation."

I already get the creeps from the toy ads squeezed between and in the middle of children's TV shows.

Re: HTTP "Prefer:Safe" – Making Online Safety Simpler in Firefox

#36

Post by Loic »

My feeling is that most of the people talking here do not have children yet. As a father, I would be really pleased to have such header accepted by many providers to just filter out content which is clearly not for kids.

A small example, I am French living abroad, if I want my kids to read a bit the news, I cannot send them on one of the 3 "major" French newspaper to read a bit. Why? Because at the bottom of the first page, they put a lot of sexual content like fully naked women wresting. If this header could remove such content, together with videos where people are beheaded. I would be pleased. Really.

If you start to think that this is censoring content, it is not, it is journalist work, that is, providing adapted content to the visitor.

Re: HTTP "Prefer:Safe" – Making Online Safety Simpler in Firefox

#38

Post by wlv »

rmc wrote: post #29
brimstedt wrote: post #12

A header Id rather see is Cookies: I-know-what-they-are-for "don't show me information about cookie usage".. )

That would be against the law. Talk to your MEP, not browser maker, if you want to change it.

This is what websites want you to think.

Do it badly -> annoy users -> no more laws that protect users.

Re: HTTP "Prefer:Safe" – Making Online Safety Simpler in Firefox

#39

Post by realusername »

darklajid wrote: post #25

Soooo.. This is sending "Hey, this is a kid on a restricted machine" to all servers now? I mean I fail to understand the original idea, obviously. It makes no sense to me. But I question the value of the above - basically now the server can _just as easily_ do crap with that information. You can now identify minors (using that feature). Beautiful. The server operators cannot decide what 'parental control' would mean…

I exactly had the same idea... I would also add that this thing is going to be useless anyway because not all the websites are going to implement it. So you will have this header + the traditional blocker...

It's totally unrelated but something I would really like to have right now would be a header with the average connection bandwidth (or just thresholds). This could be really useful to reduce the amount of data sent if the connection is really bad.

Re: HTTP "Prefer:Safe" – Making Online Safety Simpler in Firefox

#40

Post by fafner »

darklajid wrote: post #25

Soooo.. This is sending "Hey, this is a kid on a restricted machine" to all servers now? I mean I fail to understand the original idea, obviously. It makes no sense to me. But I question the value of the above - basically now the server can _just as easily_ do crap with that information. You can now identify minors (using that feature). Beautiful. The server operators cannot decide what 'parental control' would mean…

You can't identify minors because this isn't just a feature for minors but, e.g., for companies or public terminals as well. Of course it depends on the websites to deal with it. But, e.g., most popular porn sites actually do care about stuff like this.

There is no UI in Firefox because Firefox uses the operating systems parental control features to enable/disable it. And those features should have a UI within the system. That's why it is only implemented for OS X and Windows at the moment.

Post reply on HN