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Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users

blog.mozilla.org

271–280 of 339 posts

Re: Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://yourdomain.com/path/to/something?SESSION=af2828c119ae1 and yes, all URLs in every page were rewritten during page generation to include the session ID.

Didn't that break bookmarks?

This was 1994. Web technology was barely even emergent.

Re: Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users

#272

> making Firefox the most private and secure major browser available across Windows and Mac. Which one do they think is the most private and secure browser for Linux?

You'll be happy to see they've edited the announcement to include Linux now, likely in response to this or the other comment like it. :)

Re: Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users

#273
post #231

please someone fix the internet... I don't want to see any cookie popups on each site and accept / decline each cooke first only so I can see the content I want. I don't care about all these cookies and this should be managed by a browser. I hope what Firefox did is the beginning of such a fix.

Yes. Browsers should be required to show a cookie settings dialog once and then send the selected answer to all websites in a header. And websites should be required to read the header and behave according to it. The problem would be solved quickly that way...

Re: Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users

#274
post #178
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why weren’t separate cookie jars the default in the first place? Tracking today is an interaction between cookies and pages, not really because cookies were designed to be shared between domains. Because of that, ads on web pages are a reason that information gets shared across sites. Any ad or other iFramed content that’s served on a site can get the domain name of where it’s be served from and then access the iFr…

The solution still seems to be to: 1. Use Firefox, block .js by default, and selectively allow. 2. Set browser to block cross-site cookies, and to purge all cookies when closing browser. 3. Avoid tabbed browsing, and restart browser after using a website. I've been doing this since about 2006. It's inconvenient, but gives some peace of mind.

To reduce the burden use extension Temporary containers, so each tab opens into a clean environment.

And use Firefox container to auto-open domains on specific containers where you want to keep sessions or have a shared profile among various domains

Re: Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not possible to block browser fingerprinting since it's a range of techniques and heuristics based on numerous features. There's no "turn off fingerprinting" button you can just press.

It is possible to enable obstacles to fingerprinting. In Firefox, it is configuration entry privacy.resistFingerprinting Some details (the list is not exhaustive): > * Your timezone is reported to be UTC; * Not all fonts installed on your computer are available to webpages; * The browser window prefers to be set to a specific size; * Your browser reports a specific, common version number and operating system; * Your…

I’ve got this enabled - the only one that’s been more than a mild pain in the ass is the UTC timezone change. Always takes a minute to remember why a site is telling me my appointment is at 2:30 in the morning.

Re: Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users

#276
post #190
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution still seems to be to: 1. Use Firefox, block .js by default, and selectively allow. 2. Set browser to block cross-site cookies, and to purge all cookies when closing browser. 3. Avoid tabbed browsing, and restart browser after using a website. I've been doing this since about 2006. It's inconvenient, but gives some peace of mind.

That’d certainly prevent most tracking, yeah. This new Firefox feature should make #2 and #3 unnecessary. I think this feature by Firefox is great, and privacy options are getting objectively better, if slowly. But the cynic in me guessing that server side tracking methods are going to start getting secretly better, if they haven’t already.

I'm not sure about #3. there's still sessions, localstorage, indexDB, etc

Re: Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users

#277
post #178
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why weren’t separate cookie jars the default in the first place? Tracking today is an interaction between cookies and pages, not really because cookies were designed to be shared between domains. Because of that, ads on web pages are a reason that information gets shared across sites. Any ad or other iFramed content that’s served on a site can get the domain name of where it’s be served from and then access the iFr…

The solution still seems to be to: 1. Use Firefox, block .js by default, and selectively allow. 2. Set browser to block cross-site cookies, and to purge all cookies when closing browser. 3. Avoid tabbed browsing, and restart browser after using a website. I've been doing this since about 2006. It's inconvenient, but gives some peace of mind.

2 and 3 are "browse in private mode", to make thing simple.

Re: Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone should use FF. Wouldn't simply installing an ad/tracking blocker like uBlock Origin be just as effective, if not moreso?

There's some overlap, but ads aren't the only thing using this. Google Fonts is the classic example of something that does add value (nice fonts) to a webpage, and as such isn't blocked by most adblockers (including uBO) by default, but is still able to use this for tracking because the same domain serves the font files on every website using them.

Very insightful response. The tendency is to look at the cookie problem as an advertising problem. Whereas, there are other cross-origin use cases that are not adverts but pose the same tracking threat. Anything on a CDN (like common javascript libraries) share this trait.

Re: Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way? If I'm storing 255 bytes of username/email/credentials/settings/etc, but pad in some fun way to 512 bytes prior to encryption, what in the world does knowing that the cookie is 512 bytes do you? You have no idea what data is stored. You don't know if there are 512 bytes of actual data, 128 bytes with lots of fluff, or anything at all other than 512 bytes. Hell, it could be 0 bytes of data and 512 bytes o…

If the contents of the cookie is a JSON array of recently viewed items, then the size is correlated to whether I've been actively viewing items recently. Adding random padding makes it harder to get a signal, but with a high enough sample size, it's still possible to get some information. If you always pad to a fixed size, then there's probably no useful information. At the moment, I think I have enough to do, but I'…

>If

That's are really big word in that sentence. You have NO idea, like 0, what is stored in an encrypted cookie. To even think you do is just pure folly.

Re: Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no technical reason why this has to be hard. If jira was at jira.atlassian.com and bitbucket was bitbucket.atlassian.com, they would have the same origin, plus they would make the relationship between them visible to any moderately savvy user. It’s only complicated because they allow their marketing dept to make it complicated.

I think that’s unfair. By tying things to domains that way, you also make it potentially difficult to change URL structure (look at how long the various go.com domains lasted across all Disney/ABC properties. I know of teams that had very real problems years later b/c the infra was still based on domain stuff that was setup 15 years prior when the parent company thought internet portals were worth spending billions o…

Also if you sign into Google, notice you bounce through YouTube for what I assume to be similar reasons
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