Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ridiculous comment. People should not have to choose between functionality and privacy.
Implement it then.
Implement what? The internet?
We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities
291–300 of 306 posts
Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ridiculous comment. People should not have to choose between functionality and privacy.
You can't go out in public naked and just ask everyone to look away. If you want someone you don't trust to run unvetted general purpose code on your machine you have to accept that you are trading away some privacy. You can sandbox them (wear cloths) but that doesn't give you strict privacy.
I do wear clothes (all JS code runs in a sandbox).
This is a bit like saying "you should lock the door to your house" and therefore refusing to prosecute someone who steals from a house with a broken window frame. I did lock my door, and it's still a crime regardless!
Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the last ten years has qubes moved on to support more hardware? Every 4 years I would try to use it only to find it didn't support any of my hardware.
We buy off the shelf laptops, not sure anyone ever checked that it can run Qubes specifically before trying to install it (I'm sure of at least one person: myself). Doesn't just about any x64 machine with hardware where drivers are available in standard kernels also work with Qubes? What have you bought that's not supported?
.y attempts were 4 yrs ago and prior to that about 4 yrs prior. Home built PC's, random laptops, etc.
Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're the only one out of 100 that visits HN, or who's use matches a particular timezone, or who has the use pattern that [anti-]correlates with your work pattern, or ...
My brain is a bit slow today: > You're the only one out of 100 that visits HN So the HN operator sees someone using this browser, with this timezone. Then I go to some other site. Let's pretend that site's operator and HN's are identical. How will they know that I'm the same guy who went to HN? How does he know there aren't two people who use the browser in the same timezone (and the other one doesn't go to HN)?
I think the point is that it takes very few data points to effectively deanonymize someone. And the less common a data point is, the greater the information gain. "User is male" eliminates ~half of users. "User actively reads HackerNews" eliminates >99%. "User uses this niche browser that only 1000 people have ever been seen using" eliminates 99.999%.
This is how surveillance operates at scale. You don't need a stable identifier linking a specific person's identity, you just need a few data points to narrow it down to even a few thousand people. Then you apply more focus on those people, gathering data points that eliminate people until you're left with your target. And thanks to decades of global iteration on surveillance infrastructure, and AI to glue data sets together, it's all automated.
Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
It used to be called Panoptoclik (sp?), a reference to Foucault's theory of the panopticon. Focault's extracurriculars are well documented and not everything is an "incident" -- it's a thread on fingerprinting. People who study that are aware what is now called "cover your tracks", and people who do post grads tend to be well rounded enough to have read a bit of philosophy, or at least, they did in my day. So what ha…
You invalidated your initial claim. Panopticon is not a pedo. Therefore the project was not named after one. Therefore the robot was right.
Foucault was, but if we misunderstand on purpose, the sky is the limit.
Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
It used to be called Panoptoclik (sp?), a reference to Foucault's theory of the panopticon. Focault's extracurriculars are well documented and not everything is an "incident" -- it's a thread on fingerprinting. People who study that are aware what is now called "cover your tracks", and people who do post grads tend to be well rounded enough to have read a bit of philosophy, or at least, they did in my day. So what ha…
Funny you mention Wikipedia You said it was “named after a pedophile”, that is wrong >>The word panopticon derives from the Greek word for "all seeing" – panoptes. The concept was invented by Jeremy Bentham, who died before Foucault was born. Interesting that you named your HN account after a famous homophobe.
>Interesting that you named your HN account after a famous homophobe.
that guy is no longer with the project and does brave now iirc
(it's super interesting to us that two different people took such a wild leap btw)
Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny you mention Wikipedia You said it was “named after a pedophile”, that is wrong >>The word panopticon derives from the Greek word for "all seeing" – panoptes. The concept was invented by Jeremy Bentham, who died before Foucault was born. Interesting that you named your HN account after a famous homophobe.
>Interesting that you named your HN account after a famous homophobe. that guy is no longer with the project and does brave now iirc (it's super interesting to us that two different people took such a wild leap btw)
>>that guy is no longer with the project and does brave now iirc
Foucault is dead.
>>(it's super interesting to us that two different people took such a wild leap btw)
It's super interesting to me that you expected people to make the wild leap from “named after a pedophile” to a project that wasn't even named after a person.
You chose to communicate poorly to make a point and are now complaining when the point turned out to not even be true.
You could have said 'Panopticlick' and people would have known what you were talking about. Instead, you left the name out and instead pointed out the rename and the “fact” that it was previously named after a pedophile. The obvious implication is that it was renamed to cover this up.
The smug tone of your follow-up leads met to the conclusion that you had some “fun” trivia from a class you took one time, and you prioritised showing that off over clear communication (while falsely implying some kind of cover-up of wrongdoing by the EFF).
Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
You invalidated your initial claim. Panopticon is not a pedo. Therefore the project was not named after one. Therefore the robot was right.
Foucault was, but if we misunderstand on purpose, the sky is the limit.
You said “named after” when you meant “named after an idea popularized by”.
If you type one thing and expect people to understand that you meant something else then I will have to assume that by this:
>>people who do post grads tend to be well rounded enough to have read a bit of philosophy, or at least, they did in my day.
you meant you once visited a university but never enrolled in any classes?
You can complain that people on the internet misunderstand on purpose (and I agree it is far to common), but that complaint is only valid if you communicate clearly yourself.
Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities
#299Honestly it seems that most of Web Standards are used mostly for fingerprinting - I think a small number of websites uses IndexedDB (who even needs it) for actually storing data rather than fingerprinting. That's why expansion of web standards is wrong. Browser should provide minimal APIs for interacting with device and features like IndexedDB can be implemented as WebAssembly library, leaking no valuable data. For e…
I'm with you up to the bit about canvas. The problem there is that if you want hardware acceleration then either you can't permit services to read back what was rendered (why do they need to do that again?) or else you're inevitably going to leak lots of very subtle platform specific details. Personally I think reading back the content of a canvas should be gated behind a permission dialog.
You can put hardware acceleration behind permission.
Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most users seem to not care about ad tech/tracking I don't think this is true. Most people don't understand that they're being tracked. The ones that do generally don't understand to what extent. You tend to get one of two responses: surprise or apathy. When people say "what are you going to do?" They don't mean "I don't care" they mean "I feel powerless to do anything about it, so I'll convince myself to not care…
> As soon as you change it from "Meta" to "some guy named Mark". There is a huge difference between those. If someone hires a PI to follow me, they are spending like $10000/week on that. Which means that their expected value is more than that, or that PI will never pay for itself. Where will this value come from? Likely from me, after all it's me they are tracking. So I am really worried, as I am about to lose a huge…
> they are spending like $10000/week on that.
> Which means that their expected value is more than that
> ... if a store installs a whole bunch of cameras ... then it probably costs them only a few cents to track me.
The camera not only works for you, but also everybody else in the store. The cost savings is through scale. So consider the situation where "Mark" is hired to not only follow you but a lot of other people. More specifically, people who interact with one another. That data can be collected in parallel, dramatically cheapening the cost per person being tailed.
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The point is that it is awareness of being tracked. The average person isn't aware that they're being tracked nor aware of what is being tracked.
Let's put it this way. If I hire some guy named "Mark" to follow you and you never find out he was following you, then you'll never be upset. But suppose I later tell you. Do you then become upset?
Most people will say "yes". So the issue wasn't "how much money" it cost. Nor was it actually "I was aware I was being followed". The issue is that you were /being followed/.
Not knowing you were being followed doesn't suddenly make it okay. But realistically that's the situation we're in. People do not know they are being followed. People that do know they're being followed don't know how much is being recorded. People that do know feel powerless to take steps against it. People that feel powerless just try to move on with their lives and not think about it because it is better to think about things you can change instead of getting depressed.
[0] https://americanprivateinvestigator.com/how-much-does-a-priv...