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Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

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Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#271

Post by ogre_codes »

daotoad wrote: post #256
secondcoming wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

allowlist/denylist

Why are people being so negative about this? If the terms whitelist/blacklist are hurtful to some people because of all the racial baggage we've applied to the words white and black, why not switch to allow/deny instead? Using allow/deny is more explicit and doesn't rely on the benign cultural associations with the colors black and white. The choice of colors used here is arbitrary. For example, one could just as eas…

I suspect it is the perception that it's a bit pedantic to correct an otherwise correct answer. I agree with you, but also don't really think it needs to be corrected every single time someone posts whitelist/blacklist.

EDIT: apparently setting allowlist/denylist won't work so it's not just being pedantic, it's wrong.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#272

Post by vorticalbox »

kriops wrote: post #146
ff4lyfer99 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched in late 2017 when they released quantum or neutrino or whatever they called it, a huge performance release. As a backend dev and security focused eng I have little reason to test drive changes in all browsers. FF has been smooth and stable for me across desktop OSs. Having no reason to alternate between that and Chrome, I’ve been confused by people saying it’s slow. It’s been, to my memory, a flawless expe…

Just interact with the Facebook chat in Chrome and FF, and you'll see that FF is significantly slower. That being said I use 90% FF, 9% safari and 0.999...% Chrome, because FF handling of tabs/containers/add-ons offers superior UX despite the performance annoyances. IMO, obviously.

I think is down to the fact that most websites target chrome first as it has the biggest market share.

I've noticed reddit is rather slow in ff but other than that not really nocoed anything massively slow or broken.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#273

Post by mixmastamyk »

wtetzner wrote: post #246
pants-no-pants wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bank still accepts fax documents. All I would have to do is find a fax machine ...

There are online services that let you upload a PDF, and they'll fax it for you.

Even in the 90s a lot of folks didn't send a "physical" fax, you could print it thru your modem. Or something similar, memory fuzzy, only did it once I think.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#274

Post by zests »

unethical_ban wrote: post #20
zests wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox sends everything you type in the address bar to google by default. Would you be able to tell the difference between stock firefox and stock chrome if all you saw was the fiddler session? I don't know, I haven't tried. I did look at a firefox session in fiddler and I was not impressed. Pick your poison. If you configure all the settings in firefox properly it might be acceptable. But can you just do the same i…

You're stretching really hard to make them equivalent. There are a number of reasons to use FF besides telemetry.

This is whataboutism. You can talk about other reasons for using firefox if you'd like (although you'd have to mention what those reasons are.) We're talking about privacy right now and firefox does not fit the bill.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#275

Post by floatboth »

Gare wrote: post #174
legym wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Javascript how are they able to retrieve something from the cache? Local, session, and cookies are domain locked.

They load the image URL and observe the loading time. If it's fetched quickly, they know it was from cache. The server (controlled by the advertisers) can intentionally add delay to those image requests that makes detection reliable.

With some forms of caching it's much simpler: the browser sends an ETag or If-Modified-Since and the server is supposed to return 304 Not Modified to optimize the load if the cached resource is still valid.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#276

Post by Nextgrid »

ericholscher wrote: post #243
Nextgrid wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great. How are the ads paid for though - is it billed per click or per impression, or is it billed per an approximate amount of time the ad will be displayed for? The problem with charging per click or impression is that you're vulnerable to fraud which means you either lose money/trust or you have to do invasive tracking to detect & prevent fraud (which you'll be unlikely to achieve as well as the big player…

We are doing CPC & CPM pricing. I don't believe anyone has asked us for "time seen" pricing. I don't even really know how that would work, and why it wouldn't be open to fraud in a similar fashion. Do you have a good example of how this is priced, and how it would work in practice?

By time seen I don't literally mean time displayed on screen but more like TV/radio ads, as in this ad will be part of our rotation of X ads for an entire months across X publishers. I think The Deck used to do this.

Determining the price will be a bit tricky (and I would expect that you'd have to lowball yourself until your platform builds credibility in terms of good ROI) but in the long run it should mean your advertisers pay a flat price to be included per week/month regardless of actual impressions or clicks (thus there's no fraud potential as only the raw profit from the ads will matter - the only "fraud" potential would be to literally buy the advertised product en masse).

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#277

Post by floatboth »

newscracker wrote: post #91

Use uBlock Origin, Multi Account Containers, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes and CookieAutoDelete with Firefox. Make sure you aggressively clear cache, cookies, etc., periodically (with CookieAutoDelete). You’ll probably load the web servers more and also add more traffic on your network, but it will help protect your privacy since most websites don’t care about that. When websites are user hostile, you have to take pr…

Temporary Containers > any kind of auto-delete hacks

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#278

Post by valvar »

CameronNemo wrote: post #251
boogies wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t Google grant itself first-party status by redirecting you through an advertisement domain? µBlock definitely is the king of ad blocking extensions — only the fork AdNauseam ( https://adnauseam.io/ ) can compete, and that’s by both blocking ads and fighting back with obfuscating click simulation.

Hmm. I think it would be better if the extension clicked randomly rather than clicked on all ads. That would cause the numbers to be much harder to interpret, and ad agencies or departments would have a much harder time measuring their efficacy or justifying their existence.

You can change the click frequency in the settings. I guess it would be better to make that setting a part of the splash page that shows up on installation, though, as otherwise many will miss it.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#279

Post by na85 »

ogre_codes wrote: post #48

These advertising networks are destroying web performance. Most of these "Supercookies" are optimizations to improve performance. By abusing them, advertisers have turned what should be a great performance tool into a liability. I know FF suggests this won't significantly affect most websites performance, but web advertising and trackers are already responsible for a huge chunk of performance issues already. Of cours…

>but web advertising and trackers are already responsible for a huge chunk of performance issues already.

Indeed. The brave move would be to firefox to include built-in adblock, but I don't think Mozilla has the cojones.

>Of course we'll have the inevitable guy pop in here and talk up how awesome web tracking is because it helps sites monetize better, but that's all bullshit.

I think if adblocker usage became widespread we would in fact see the death of a lot of websites, but to be perfectly honest I kinda want that to happen because advertising is cancer.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#280

Post by mixmastamyk »

warent wrote: post #83
ogre_codes wrote: post #48

These advertising networks are destroying web performance. Most of these "Supercookies" are optimizations to improve performance. By abusing them, advertisers have turned what should be a great performance tool into a liability. I know FF suggests this won't significantly affect most websites performance, but web advertising and trackers are already responsible for a huge chunk of performance issues already. Of cours…

I run a network ad-block dns (pihole) and consistently 25-33% of all my network traffic is blocked as ads. It's much more than I ever imagined. Now I'm used to a different internet, when I'm using internet off the network it's like WTF is this?

I use the noscript extension that uses a scripting whitelist. Bit of a pain at first, but pretty soon your browser will be flying. No extra hardware needed.

Kid's computer has dnsmasq as a similar solution.

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