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Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

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

#181

Post by Rychard »

Smithalicious wrote: post #176
jakubp wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are happier to have your resources stolen and not be aware of it (it's invisible, you can't see what's happening and react - right?) than to be shown an annoying thing which is very much in your awareness? I don't know, I'd rather know someone is harming me silently and have the means to stop it by default. The things that are shown in front of me, I can handle them...

My computer is at maybe 20% resource utilization while I'm browsing the internet. Resource utilization only becomes a problem once you run out of resources; there is zero difference to me between 20% and 40% resource utilization other than very minor factors like a negligible increase in power draw and my fans spinning a little harder. Of course people could (and do) build malicious mining scripts that try to use way…

For devices that are directly connected to the grid, I can somewhat see your point.

However, a large portion of devices on the internet run on batteries, and don't have huge quantities of reserve power.

Back to things such as desktop computers, though: am I supposed to close my browser before doing anything CPU intensive?

Someday, will I need to close StackOverflow to avoid negatively impacting the time it takes to compile my code? That's a trade-off I'm not willing to make.

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

#182

Post by Smithalicious »

Rychard wrote: post #178
Smithalicious wrote: post #175

I don't like this reaction to crypto mining scripts. I won't argue that a lot of crypto mining scripts out there are blatantly abusive but I think that as a concept it's a great business model. I wouldn't have a problem using sites that eschewed ads and used crypto mining scripts instead and I would have no reason at all to block them (unlike ads) as long as they're well behaved. I think blocking mining scripts is a…

> I think blocking mining scripts is a step backwards, hindering the adoption of something that could finally be an unobtrusive and ethical replacement for the failing advertisement model. If the content on a website is just a vehicle for delivering advertisements, I would consider such a business model to be fundamentally flawed. Swapping "delivering advertisements" with "hijacking my processor cycles to mine crypto…

That's a fair position to hold but it doesn't scale. It's extremely hard to actually convince people to buy something regardless of how much they like it, doubly so if it's something nonphysical like online content.

I would also love to live in a world where I could just deposit some reasonable amount of money every month and have it fairly distributed to pay for all the things I love, but I can see that that's not viable in the real world. Having websites silently use my unused computer resources is a perfectly viable alternative to me in a way that forcing me to stare at things I don't care about is not.

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

#183

Post by Rychard »

Smithalicious wrote: post #182
Rychard wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think blocking mining scripts is a step backwards, hindering the adoption of something that could finally be an unobtrusive and ethical replacement for the failing advertisement model. If the content on a website is just a vehicle for delivering advertisements, I would consider such a business model to be fundamentally flawed. Swapping "delivering advertisements" with "hijacking my processor cycles to mine crypto…

That's a fair position to hold but it doesn't scale. It's extremely hard to actually convince people to buy something regardless of how much they like it, doubly so if it's something nonphysical like online content. I would also love to live in a world where I could just deposit some reasonable amount of money every month and have it fairly distributed to pay for all the things I love, but I can see that that's not v…

Sure, but tapping the unused power of my high-end desktop PC seems to be far more valuable than doing the same thing to a mobile device with a constrained power profile.

How can I be sure I'm not being taken advantage of?

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

#184

Post by Smithalicious »

Rychard wrote: post #181
Smithalicious wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My computer is at maybe 20% resource utilization while I'm browsing the internet. Resource utilization only becomes a problem once you run out of resources; there is zero difference to me between 20% and 40% resource utilization other than very minor factors like a negligible increase in power draw and my fans spinning a little harder. Of course people could (and do) build malicious mining scripts that try to use way…

For devices that are directly connected to the grid, I can somewhat see your point. However, a large portion of devices on the internet run on batteries, and don't have huge quantities of reserve power. Back to things such as desktop computers, though: am I supposed to close my browser before doing anything CPU intensive? Someday, will I need to close StackOverflow to avoid negatively impacting the time it takes to c…

I think that these scripts should A) not run endlessly in the background while you're not using the website and B) be mindful of how many resources you actually have available.

I think the battery concern is valid enough and it's something that I didn't really consider since it doesn't affect me personally much[0]. I still think the tradeoff of not having ads is worth it though. Perhaps let users choose whether they want ads or mining?

[0] My portable devices are a ThinkPad with a slice battery that lasts me 9 hours of continuous normal use and a phone with a 20kmAh battery bank so I often forget battery life is a problem for some people

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

#185

Post by Smithalicious »

Rychard wrote: post #183
Smithalicious wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair position to hold but it doesn't scale. It's extremely hard to actually convince people to buy something regardless of how much they like it, doubly so if it's something nonphysical like online content. I would also love to live in a world where I could just deposit some reasonable amount of money every month and have it fairly distributed to pay for all the things I love, but I can see that that's not v…

Sure, but tapping the unused power of my high-end desktop PC seems to be far more valuable than doing the same thing to a mobile device with a constrained power profile. How can I be sure I'm not being taken advantage of?

You can't really be sure that you're not being taken advantage of, but neither can you with ads. I still run into ads that hijack my back button on my phone all the time.

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

#186

Post by Rychard »

Smithalicious wrote: post #185
Rychard wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but tapping the unused power of my high-end desktop PC seems to be far more valuable than doing the same thing to a mobile device with a constrained power profile. How can I be sure I'm not being taken advantage of?

You can't really be sure that you're not being taken advantage of, but neither can you with ads. I still run into ads that hijack my back button on my phone all the time.

It sounds like there's no advantage then; if we allow this, companies would be incentivized to harvest our data and run our CPUs at 100%. We'd just be giving them another revenue model.

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

#187

Post by Smithalicious »

Rychard wrote: post #186
Smithalicious wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really be sure that you're not being taken advantage of, but neither can you with ads. I still run into ads that hijack my back button on my phone all the time.

It sounds like there's no advantage then; if we allow this, companies would be incentivized to harvest our data and run our CPUs at 100%. We'd just be giving them another revenue model.

This shouldn't need to be said but companies do need some revenue model. In the end they need to make that money some way, be it your data, your CPU cycles, your attention, or your actual money (or some combination of the aforementioned). Out of those I think "your CPU cycles" is the least intrusive out of the ones that can actually be feasibly implemented in all cases.

Of course companies will always be incentivized to squeeze as much value out of you as possible, but they'll be simultaneously incentivized not to screw people over too much. Just like how abuse ads have led to widespride use of adblock, abusive use of mining scripts will just lead to people blocking them (be it on a case-by-case basis or universlaly). But while I think ads are always going to bother me no matter what they are or how many of them there are, there's a level of CPU utilization that I wouldn't mind or even notice at all.

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

#188

Post by roca »

hanniabu wrote: post #173
bloopernova wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Thoughts on Brave browser?

Brave's good but since it's a wrapper around Chromium, you're still supporting Google control over the Web.

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

#189

Post by Rychard »

Smithalicious wrote: post #187
Rychard wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like there's no advantage then; if we allow this, companies would be incentivized to harvest our data and run our CPUs at 100%. We'd just be giving them another revenue model.

This shouldn't need to be said but companies do need some revenue model. In the end they need to make that money some way, be it your data, your CPU cycles, your attention, or your actual money (or some combination of the aforementioned). Out of those I think "your CPU cycles" is the least intrusive out of the ones that can actually be feasibly implemented in all cases. Of course companies will always be incentivized…

I see your point, but there would be nothing stopping them from double-dipping under the guise of "we need both revenue streams to pay the bills".

They'll still show us advertisements, though they'll probably optimize them to use fewer CPU cycles since those would directly affect their bottom line.

I sincerely doubt the vast majority of the general population are using ad-blocking software today; at least, not to the extent that companies would dial back their advertisements in an attempt to prevent the size of this demographic from increasing further.

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

#190

Post by sneak »

gcb0 wrote: post #108
4mitkumar wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this setting causes problems with google captcha - the number of challenges that you will need to solve will drastically increase No kidding. I'm talking about ~30-40 clicks (1 click per task in the captcha grid)

not to mention when google puts you in captcha-hell-ban. often, after a few difficult ones, I realize I get stuck into the same 20 challenges. over and over. no matter if I get them rigth or not. We do run all browser in the office with figerprint protection on and run non-exit-tor-nodes in all offices. But those are hardly excuses. The hell bans happens more often on firefox for android, but I guess that is what you…

No, it’s the site owner choosing to outsource their decisions about gatekeeping a private site to Google. Google isn’t censoring you via CAPTCHA, the site owner is.
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