Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#291

Post by ogre_codes » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:16 PM UTC

foepys wrote: post #164

jypepin wrote: post #28

Tracking has become so bad that it seems like users have to spend money (more bandwidth) to protect themselves from it. Crazy and sad to see where we've come :\

Nobody would accept interconnected face scanners in every building they walk into but online it's somehow okay.

> Nobody would accept interconnected face scanners in every building they walk into but online it's somehow okay.

There are cars with license plate scanners that wardrive the world. They scan plates in shopping centers, businesses, and even apartment buildings so on the off chance law enforcement, repo businesses, or anyone who wants to know where your car is parked can track you.

People accept that. Or rather, most are blissfully unaware that it happens.

If your grocery store added face tracking to their existing security cameras, would you even know it? Would you know if they sold that data?

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#292

Post by s_tec » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

msl wrote: post #231

ericholscher wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're trying to build an ad network that doesn't track users: https://www.ethicalads.io/ We talked a little bit about how these ads still work, even without tracking you. You might be losing 10-15% of revenue, but if you never had that revenue to start with, you don't miss it: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2018/04/ethical-advertising-w... I think the real secret is just to not become dependent on the additive revenu…

These are some of the only ads I see online these days (on Read the Docs, mostly). I don't use ad blockers, but I do use tracker blockers, and those block pretty much all ads, for obvious reasons. Not these ones, though. And that's how it's supposed to go.

Which ones? I think I would like to try your setup, since it sounds like a good compromise between having my data harvested and being kicked off of sites for blocking their ads.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#293

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

varenc wrote: post #239

pkulak wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I didn't mean their _own_ servers, I just meant hard-coding 8.8.8.8 into the DNS settings, for example. I wonder if you could hijack those requests at your router and send them back to your Pi-Hole? But then they just switch to DNS over TLS...

I just have my network block outgoing DNS queries that aren’t from the gateway. But you’re so right that DoH is going to throw a wrench in this.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#294

Post by ogre_codes » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

abcd_f wrote: post #68

Per-site caching negates the principal selling point of centrally-hosted JS and resources, including fonts. The convenience remains, but all speed-related perks (due to the resources being reused from earlier visits to unrelated sites) are no more... which is actually great, because it reduces the value that unscrupulous free CDN providers can derive from their "properties". It also means that I can remove fonts.goog…

> It also means that I can remove fonts.google.com from the uBlock blacklist. Yay.

If you are downloading fonts from Google, Google harvests your IP and likely the referring site from the request. Even if your browser doesn't sent the referrer, many sites have a unique enough font-fingerprint that Google can figure out where you are.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#295

Post by unilynx » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:20 PM UTC

gaius_baltar wrote: post #285

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 ...

> My bank still accepts fax documents. All I would have to do is find a fax machine ... On linux you can use [efax]( https://linux.die.net/man/1/efax ) and a modem and... ooops, good luck finding a modem. I did this for real ~10 years ago when a stupid company didn't accept a scanned PDF by email and required a fax of the actual document "because security". The difference is that I had a modem in an old laptop at tha…

I’m not sure if it required anything from the network, but my Siemens C35 could send faxes

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#296

Post by dylan604 » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:20 PM UTC

mixmastamyk wrote: post #273

wtetzner wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or going to a shop like Kinkos or a local print/copy shop. They offered sending/receiving faxes or FaaS before _aaS was a term of "endearment".

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#297

Post by mistahchris » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

buzzy_hacker wrote: post #188

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…

Agree, but substituting multi-account containers with temporary containers https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

This looks excellent. I've wanted something like this before but wasn't aware of this extension. Thanks for sharing :)

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#298

Post by ericholscher » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #276

ericholscher wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adv…

Gotcha, that definitely makes sense. We are looking at doing that for some of our larger sites, similar to Daring Fireball: https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ -- which I believe is based off the old Deck model :)

Thanks for following up.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#299

Post by baby » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

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…

Security in general is a performance and usability killer. If “attackers” were not a thing your internet would be much much faster, hell your smartphone wouldn’t need to encrypt itself or paying in a shop wouldn’t need a chip & pin.

What I’m saying is that a lot of applications have many attackers in their threat models, but advertisers have so far been out of scope.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#300

Post by dylan604 » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:25 PM UTC

mstade wrote: post #221

JKCalhoun wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25-33% of requests? Or is this a percentage of bytes? Because I wonder what percentage of bandwidth (in terms of bytes) trackers/banners/ads account for. Need to set up a pi-hole ... just too many other projects....

How would you measure bytes if the requests are blocked?

Some people are good at thinking a process through to the end. Others are not and ask questions at the first unknown. It's a large part of why I'm not a teacher.