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

Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 246 posts

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#131

Post by kevingadd »

bloopernova wrote: post #65
GeekyBear wrote: post #12

I appreciate it when my browser takes the position that it acts as the user's agent, and not the advertising network's agent.

This attitude from the Mozilla crew has convinced me to try switching from Chrome for a week. (I understand that these latest features aren't yet available in the normal releases)

I think current Firefox has audio/video autoplay controls, and in my experience they're wonderful compared to Chrome's. A one-time popup that lets you easily control it per-site. Already enough to make me prefer it.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#132

Post by kevingadd »

oftenwrong wrote: post #64
jefftk wrote: post #24

> In the coming months, we will start testing these protections with small groups of users and will continue to work with Disconnect to improve and expand the set of domains blocked by Firefox. We plan to enable these protections by default for all Firefox users in a future release. While lots of people here already have uMatrix or other blockers running, blocking fingerprinting and cryptomining domains by default wo…

>(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google.) Is that relevant?

Tracking is one of Google's services and it's widely used

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#133

Post by gnud »

mindcrime wrote: post #126
ogre_codes wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This little bit of misdirection Google and Facebook have propagated about how much better the advertising you get with tracking is the slimiest piece of bait-and-switch in history. Seeing people repeat it like it's fact is testament to just how insidious it is. Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser. So advertisements you get are even sleazier than non-targeted…

Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser. Advertising doesn't help the advertiser unless it helps you. Showing you an ad for something you don't want, can't use, and would never buy, benefits nobody.

Advertising helps the advertiser if it results in a sale - it doesn't matter if the sale helps the viewer.

If the ad results in the viewer getting an eating disorder, for example, that's fine for the advertiser if it also results in a sale.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#134

Post by kevingadd »

mcsmash wrote: post #37
mikro2nd wrote: post #31

I don't much like the notion of farming out my "cryptomining blocker" to some unknown-to-me third party. There are a (small) number of sites that do cryptomining after asking for an opt-in permission (e.g. bit.tube). It seems to me that this is an interesting exploration of new, alternate funding models than serving ads, and I, for one, like to (sometimes) support these. I'd hate to see them land up in a blocklist I…

This. The internet desperately needs to progress beyond an advertisement driven business model. Disallowing these scripts seems a little heavy handed. Perhaps the addition of a "requestComputeResources" method to the browser's api would give a way to throttle them instead of outright banning them.

There's not really a way to detect that someone is cryptomining, they can just do it with regular JS or webgl (which has a compute focused API in the works). I don't think either of those features could ever be opt-in. Detecting mining in WebAssembly would be even harder.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#135

Post by JohnFen »

manigandham wrote: post #117
JohnFen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Targeting this advert to most likely be seen by people who actually had been thinking of buying a hat shaped like sporting equipment is still a good idea too. Not if that targeting is done using data gathered about me without my consent -- as it almost universally is. Targeting based on context (what sort of website the ad is on, for instance), is fine.

Data about you is not your data. Anyone can stand outside and watch what people do and take notes. That doesn't need your consent. It's the same thing here.

> It's the same thing here.

I disagree completely.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#136

Post by manigandham »

JohnFen wrote: post #135
manigandham wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data about you is not your data. Anyone can stand outside and watch what people do and take notes. That doesn't need your consent. It's the same thing here.

> It's the same thing here. I disagree completely.

Why?

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#137

Post by johnp_ »

charlesdaniels wrote: post #59

I agree with the general sentiment in the comments that this is good -- fingerprinting in particular is something browser vendors should be trying to combat. I am concerned about the approach however; a simple blacklist of fingerprinting scripts may be insufficient, in that non-blocked scripts can still access the data that is used to accomplish fingerprinting. Personally, I would like to see more security around the…

> more security around the data that is used for fingerprinting, such as [...] screen size, window size

Available in Nightly under a hidden boolean preference `privacy.resistFingerprinting.letterboxing`.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#138

Post by ogre_codes »

mindcrime wrote: post #126
ogre_codes wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This little bit of misdirection Google and Facebook have propagated about how much better the advertising you get with tracking is the slimiest piece of bait-and-switch in history. Seeing people repeat it like it's fact is testament to just how insidious it is. Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser. So advertisements you get are even sleazier than non-targeted…

Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser. Advertising doesn't help the advertiser unless it helps you. Showing you an ad for something you don't want, can't use, and would never buy, benefits nobody.

Advertising doesn't help the advertiser unless it helps you.

This is nonsense. History is littered with cases of advertising abuse and misuse. Everything from literal snake oil salesmen to modern day shysters profiting from selling conspiracy theories and anti-tax bullshit is enabled and propagated by advertising.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#139

Post by ogre_codes »

gnud wrote: post #133
mindcrime wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser. Advertising doesn't help the advertiser unless it helps you. Showing you an ad for something you don't want, can't use, and would never buy, benefits nobody.

Advertising helps the advertiser if it results in a sale - it doesn't matter if the sale helps the viewer. If the ad results in the viewer getting an eating disorder, for example, that's fine for the advertiser if it also results in a sale.

Advertising helps the advertiser if it results in a sale - it doesn't matter if the sale helps the viewer.

Exactly this.

Often it doesn't even require a sale. A lot of Facebook & Google advertising is for bullshit sites which push increasingly sketchy content backed by even sketchier advertising. Sometimes the goal isn't even profit, the Russians paid for advertising to influence politics.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#140

Post by russh »

lrem wrote: post #121
jimmaswell wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptomining seems like a fine alternative to ads to me. Or just the general idea of making the client do some computation work for you.

I like my battery to last a whole day, pretty please. Whenever on mobile and AMP is not an option, I'll try Firefox Focus. If that doesn't work, I'm as likely to move on as to revert to letting the site's affiliates run Javascript on my phone.

I too do not like spending a $1 so somebody can earn $0.0002.
Post reply on HN