Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by krageon » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #183

Xelbair wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is a corporation, the only goal of corporation is to make money. So yes, that is the biggest reason - their business objective. It just happened that it also did something good for everyone.

> only goal of corporation is to make money A corporation can set any goal the founders please. Making money need not be the dominant one. Obviously making enough to stay solvent helps with longevity.

Have you worked in one (or more than one) and observed it's high-level decision making? It's about money and nothing else. This is not unique or special and the only way you'll ever truly believe it is any different is if you make the grandly naive mistake of listening to the marketing department (either internal or external).

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

#192

Post by newscracker » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 2:52 PM UTC

leesalminen wrote: post #186

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only goal of corporation is to make money A corporation can set any goal the founders please. Making money need not be the dominant one. Obviously making enough to stay solvent helps with longevity.

Alphabet is a publicly traded company and the officers have a fiduciary duty to do what’s best for their shareholders. This normally means maximizing profits. A corporate officer could make a case to shareholders that not maximizing profits in X area could have Y long term benefit, but that’s not very common these days.

Of course, the officers of public companies try to do what’s best for shareholders. But here’s a different take on it by Tim Cook five years ago [1] (interpret it however you’d like):

> "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.

> …

> He didn't stop there, however, as he looked directly at the NCPPR representative and said, "If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock."

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/03/at-apple-shareholder...

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

#193

Post by stordoff » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:02 PM UTC

darkpuma wrote: post #74

SquareWheel wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe it's to make it obvious that a tile has changed...

No, sorry but that's nonsense. reCAPTCHAv2 doesn't do the tile fade in unless your v3 score is low. The fade in I'm talking about can take one to five seconds per tile, plainly designed to annoy the user. Here is a video of the fade-in in action: https://youtu.be/zGW7TRtcDeQ?t=89 (Note that you do not need to be on a shared IP to experience this. Merely using firefox with resist fingerprinting and a adblocker is enou…

I submit all the time before realising one has started to change. It's terribly frustrating.

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

#194

Post by pferde » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #67

jancsika wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a problem. The W3C should probably create a new, rich spec hundreds of pages long so that frontend developers may instead declare images as a unitless set of point relationships to be rendered at any resolution without digital artifacts. For example, instead of working on the pixel level, the developer would be free to simply declare, "an arc may exist in one of these four locations." Then, merely by declaring…

The browser can also ship with a pretrained GAN, so the site just asks for a picture of a cat and then the GAN creates one as needed, but nobody will know exactly which cat you saw.

That will be remembered as day when "Catwoman" went from being sexy to being weird and disgusting.

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

#195

Post by trumped » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:23 PM UTC

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #144

trumped wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

right... developers suck, overall ( I could not reply to the comment below because nyc would not let me)

It's more a case of the web being used in ways in which it wasn't really originally intended. Of course developers can implement things poorly and create problems (and often do) but demand for things like responsive sites is user-driven in my experience. If you don't understand how the web works and actively dislike the community I don't understand why you keep commenting here.

it's all good my little monkey.... also tell me why most websites use files from 20 different domains if you understand the web so well....

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

#196

Post by Yuval_Halevi » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:29 PM UTC

I'm using Brave for a while they have a function to surf the web through Tor network

which seems pretty safe

I'm glad to hear the Firefox also give a lot of value to privacy

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

#197

Post by enriquto » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:44 PM UTC

burtonator wrote: post #24

trumped wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Havent they thought about not broadcasting the window size... wtf. We are doomed apparently.

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. :-/

> Turns out anonymity is super freaking hard

Indeed, but not revealing the screen size is super easy. Just turn off javascript (except, maybe, for a whitelist of 2 or 3 sites where you really need it).

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

#198

Post by TheKarateKid » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:50 PM UTC

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.

Google still knows my precise location sometimes even when I'm connected to a VPN. The browser itself uses more (Wifi network, phones linked to your account) than just your IP to determine it, and there's no way to control it.

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

#199

Post by TheKarateKid » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:54 PM UTC

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…

Sorry, but there's really no reason to force HTTPS on static webpages, news sites, or any site where you're just browsing/consuming.

Google is smart enough where they could've enforced the penalty on sites that should use HTTPS, such as those with any kind of form submission or login. But they chose not to without much of a reason, and that's why I can believe it helped some hidden motive of theirs.

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

#200

Post by enriquto » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 4:03 PM UTC

detaro wrote: post #180

cortic wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? Admittedly my knowledge of CSS is dated, but without scripting enabled you can't set cookies, make auto server request, or even auto set an external CSS file (that could be served and counted).. Its not something I've considered before and i am genuinely curious how this would work.

You can make server requests by loading images and fonts. Browsers only load those resources they actually need, so there's lots of opportunities for conditionally triggering requests. Media queries for window size, fallback fonts to check installed fonts, css feature checks to make guesses at the browser type, ...

oh my god, what a world we live in!