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Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

zdnet.com

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Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#131

Post by tsukurimashou »

homero wrote: post #127
Jonnax wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a good comparison: Android Chrome's user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; SM-G928F Build/MMB29K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Mobile Safari/537.36 Versus Android Firefox's user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android 9; Mobile; rv:66.0) Gecko/66.0 Firefox/66.0 Note how the Chrome browser announces your phone model and software build version to the world. With regional models with car…

Yup it's disgusting. Even in private mode sites know it's me with my build version and ip.

To be honest most people are confused about "private mode", I agree there should be privacy options enabled by default with it, but the reality is pretty much "no browser history will be stored (locally) and your session / cookies will be isolated between private mode and "normal mode"

Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#132

Post by scotty79 »

nindalf wrote: post #129
tyingq wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that's the biggest reason Google was so interested in "https everywhere". That removed detailed browsing visibility from a lot of entities, but not Google.

I've seen this tendency on HN - if this person/entity does something, I suspect it must be bad or selfish. On the subject of HTTPS - do you think the interests of ordinary consumers are in any way served by continuing on HTTP? Countless websites, even those accepting login credentials used to think that it was acceptable to not take the trouble to set up HTTPS. The only thing the operators of these websites cared abo…

> if this person/entity does something, I suspect it must be bad or selfish.

Isn't that the basic assumption that whole our economy rests upon?

Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#135

Post by Vinnl »

regecks wrote: post #3

I try enabling this occasionally, but it causes my zoom preference to be forgotten for each site after I close the tab. Seems to be intentional ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1369357 ). I need zoom to not ruin my eyes - is it just too hard to mask the true zoom? With the letterboxing, it seems like it would mostly not do anything when using a tiling WM with fixed splits. Does that sound right?

> it seems like it would mostly not do anything when using a tiling WM with fixed splits

In the bug report [1] it says:

> We haven't yet landed this feature in Tor Browser for at a few reasons: > - ... > - * Tiling window managers on Linux are hard to detect. Any implementation will need to behave appropriately for those.

So it appears they are still working on that.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407366

Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#136

Post by mpfundstein »

akerro wrote: post #128
pera wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using privacy.resistFingerprinting for a while and also recommend it, but there is one major "side effect": your reCAPTCHA score will drop to 0.1 making many websites really tedious to use. It's a price I'm willing to pay though...

> ne major "side effect": your reCAPTCHA score will drop to 0.1 making many websites really tedious to use. I instantly leave a website that has this aggressive reCaptcha that uses free labour to train algorithms.

Dito. This thing must be boycotted

Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#137

Post by ionised »

ehsankia wrote: post #28
burtonator wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apps need it to determine where to place elements. If it wasn't you would still be able to reverse engineer it by sticking elements outside the viewport and seeing if they're hidden or not. Turns out anonymity is super freaking hard. :-/

I don't get it. Don't the majority of people browse at full screen, on common devices which all have the same fullscreen dimensions? Who out there browses to a size, resizes there window, then browses to another website, then resizes again and so on? That makes no sense.

Browsing in full screen is just a waste of space on my preferred devices.

Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#138

Post by alkonaut »

fxfan wrote: post #94

Maybe firefox should also install ublock origin by default? This isn't just for some power users- it will increase their share among regular people whose pages will load even faster making Firefox popular. Or are they waiting until the user share falls below 5%? Maybe they should listen to Andy grove and prepare now.

They should turn fingerprinting to max and install uBlock origin by default.

It might mean millions of FF users would suddenly struggle with captchas, but it might also mean that site creators just stop using reCaptcha and similar.

Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#139

Post by [deleted] »

newscracker wrote: post #37

Every time there's something about online privacy with browsers, it's mostly Firefox or Safari. I wondered if Chrome had resisting fingerprinting on its radar (guessing that it wouldn't be in Google's interests to add any feature that would thwart profiling users online), and I found this [1] confirming my guess (emphasis mine): > Since we don't believe it's feasible to provide some mode of Chrome that can truly prev…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#140

Post by homero »

tsukurimashou wrote: post #131
homero wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup it's disgusting. Even in private mode sites know it's me with my build version and ip.

To be honest most people are confused about "private mode", I agree there should be privacy options enabled by default with it, but the reality is pretty much "no browser history will be stored (locally) and your session / cookies will be isolated between private mode and "normal mode"

I don't expect serial numbers to be sent even in public mode. Android build plus ip might as well be a serial number.
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