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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

#211

Post by thrax »

PaulHoule wrote: post #174
jug wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ironic that in a time when the browser used matters less than ever thanks to good HTML5 standard support and differences lie more in the fringe, most recent corners of the living standard, the user agent strings are more detailed than ever. It would help if the browser vendors, particularly Google, took a step back and spent some time thinking about why user agent strings were invented. They're more like cludges…

Actually browser compatibility is not getting better, it is getting worse. I was working for a firm last year that made a system with a browser front end that only supported Chrome and Safari, not Edge or Firefox -- this is happening everywhere, and it is why MS threw in the towel with Edge.

Browser compatibility is improving because the incompatible browsers are dying off.

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

#212

Post by anoncake »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #189
leesalminen wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maximising shareholder value is very often not what's best for shareholders. The current popular myth that it is somehow mandatory has been coincident with a definite change for the worse. Hasn't Amazon been notable for actively avoiding profit through much of its existence? https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/04/27/harvard... https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...

They reinvested their profits in themselves. That's not really avoiding profit (and I think there is a definition of profit that includes the company gaining value)

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

#213

Post by anoncake »

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. :-/

If you insist on letting random people run code in your document reader.

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

#214

Post by akerro »

richjdsmith wrote: post #206
akerro wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I personally take the route of training the algorithms poorly. It wants me to select streetlights? Fine, I'll pick all but one streetlight and maybe even a tree. Do I have to click more boxes because of this? For sure. Is it worth it? Yep.

>Is it worth it? Yep.

It is not. 100_000s of people got/will get the same picture and marked squares correctly.

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

#215

Post by kowdermeister »

move-on-by wrote: post #210
kowdermeister wrote: post #157

This is horrible from a UX perspective. There are many fingerprinting techniques besides this. I don't see how adding a user hostile behaviour will help.

What else can they do to decrease the effectiveness of increasingly hostile trackers?

Easy way to do ad networks host blocking. The real problem is canvas fingerprinting, but that's an inherent issue of the whole graphics stack so everything depends on your freak-out factor.

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

#216

Post by chipperyman573 »

SquareWheel wrote: post #75
darkpuma wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Here is a video of the fade-in in action Okay, I agree that's punitive. I've never seen a fade that slow, so it must be at the lowest levels of trust.

If you use a VPN (a popular one like PIA or ExpressVPN) you will almost always get a fade in that slow. And it is really annoying.
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