I don't much like the notion of farming out my "cryptomining blocker" to some unknown-to-me third party. There are a (small) number of sites that do cryptomining after asking for an opt-in permission (e.g. bit.tube). It seems to me that this is an interesting exploration of new, alternate funding models than serving ads, and I, for one, like to (sometimes) support these. I'd hate to see them land up in a blocklist I don't have some degree of control over.
Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta
31–40 of 246 posts
Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The average user doesn't even know about fingerprinting Yet. Give it one or two scandals, maybe involving a heavyweight like Reddit, and users will be aware of what fingerprinting is and why it's not in their interest to have their digital fingerprints taken, analyzed and stored every time they enter the internet equivalent of a grocery store. Give them analogies they can understand and they will feel like they're…
I care about security, fingerprinting, etc... but most people don't and they don't want to learn about it. They like pretty looking things, pretty looking apps, pretty looking browsers... Apple designs have proven this, there are cheaper products with the similar features yet people want Apple. You would think everybody knows this but Windows still looks like shit. Google has improved their design system a great deal…
> I care about security, fingerprinting, etc... but most people don't and they don't want to learn about it.
Imho they would care if they knew. They don't know so they don't even know why & what they should learn about it. That's why it needs scandals and good analogies to tell them about it. They won't read "weird" tech blogs, they need the evening news to tell them about it, and to explain it in simple terms. Kind of what Al Gore did back then with global warming: "the planet has a fever". Everybody can understand that. It's not technically correct, but it gets the point across. People don't know what other products are better than Apple's, so they rely on social proof: everybody is buying Apple, so it must be good, so they buy Apple.
People are starting to shift away from Facebook because there's a narrative "Russia stole the election by using Facebook". It's wrong, but it gets the point across that Facebook's algorithms aren't transparent, FB has too much data on the users and whoever controls FB wields a powerful weapon. That got people's attention, that's what you need to for any technical issue that the general public should be informed about.
Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta
#33I do appreciate the feature! But how feasible would be to limit the amount of info retrievable from the JS layer instead than relying on a black list of domains serving fingerprinters?
Mozilla devs seem to take this into account whenever adding new JS features, at least on their mailing lists.
For example, this discussion of a new API for gamepads immediately turned to a discussion of its fingerprinting risks and how they can be mitigated: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.platform/75GrJSP...
Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta
#34Doesn't Brave, Brandon Eich's project, already do this? Its nicer to use to.
I have had mixed results with brave on my phone. Sometimes it blocks adverts sometimes it doesn't.
Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta
#35In collaboration with Disconnect, we have compiled lists of domains that serve fingerprinting and cryptomining scripts. Now in the latest Firefox Nightly and Beta versions, we give users the option to block both kinds of scripts Isn't this something that content blockers like umatrix already excel at? Why put it into the core of Firefox? I would prefer to see Firefox giving more power to extensions. For example, it i…
I prefer to have features like this in core so I don't have to give a ton of permissions to a third party. I hope it becomes powerful enough to replace uMatrix.
Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta
#36I do appreciate the feature! But how feasible would be to limit the amount of info retrievable from the JS layer instead than relying on a black list of domains serving fingerprinters?
Mozilla devs seem to take this into account whenever adding new JS features, at least on their mailing lists. For example, this discussion of a new API for gamepads immediately turned to a discussion of its fingerprinting risks and how they can be mitigated: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.platform/75GrJSP...
The www has an API for gamepads. I need a moment.
Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta
#37I don't much like the notion of farming out my "cryptomining blocker" to some unknown-to-me third party. There are a (small) number of sites that do cryptomining after asking for an opt-in permission (e.g. bit.tube). It seems to me that this is an interesting exploration of new, alternate funding models than serving ads, and I, for one, like to (sometimes) support these. I'd hate to see them land up in a blocklist I…
This. The internet desperately needs to progress beyond an advertisement driven business model. Disallowing these scripts seems a little heavy handed. Perhaps the addition of a "requestComputeResources" method to the browser's api would give a way to throttle them instead of outright banning them.
Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta
#38Kind of a shame that I can't browse that site using a VPS on a tier-2 VPS provider (Vultr)
I can access it from Tor.
Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mozilla devs seem to take this into account whenever adding new JS features, at least on their mailing lists. For example, this discussion of a new API for gamepads immediately turned to a discussion of its fingerprinting risks and how they can be mitigated: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.platform/75GrJSP...
The www has an API for gamepads. I need a moment.
It seems entirely appropriate for browsers to support input from devices other than keyboard, mouse, and touch screen.
Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta
#40In collaboration with Disconnect, we have compiled lists of domains that serve fingerprinting and cryptomining scripts. Now in the latest Firefox Nightly and Beta versions, we give users the option to block both kinds of scripts Isn't this something that content blockers like umatrix already excel at? Why put it into the core of Firefox? I would prefer to see Firefox giving more power to extensions. For example, it i…
I prefer to have features like this in core so I don't have to give a ton of permissions to a third party. I hope it becomes powerful enough to replace uMatrix.
Extensions are analyzed by the Firefox team:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/AMO...
If the review process is still insecure (That is how I understand you reply) I would prefer them to put their energy into this. Analyzing popular extensions in depth (and giving them some 'in depth analyzed' badge) so you do not have to trust a third party.