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Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

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Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#311

Twitter uses these type of cookies. They even use cookies that do not contain any reference to the twitter domain. It is how they track people who have been suspended on the platform

Browse twitter through nitter and all these problems go away, and it's actually a usable interface on top.

Nitter looks pretty cool. Didn’t know about that one. Does something like that exist for Facebook as well?

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#312
Unfortunately, some trackers have found ways to abuse these shared resources to follow users around the web. In the case of Firefox’s image cache, a tracker can create a supercookie by “encoding” an identifier for the user in a cached image on one website, and then “retrieving” that identifier on a different website by embedding the same image. To prevent this possibility, Firefox 85 uses a different image cache for every website a user visits. That means we still load cached images when a user revisits the same site, but we don’t share those caches across sites.

Wait, so one form of "supercookie" is basically the same as the transparent gif in an email?

https://help.campaignmonitor.com/email-open-rates#accuracy

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#313
post #270

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…

It would be nicer if no tracking would mean no data sent to ethicalads unless user engaging with ad because we know what happen when we trust advertising companies. So a step in the right direction but i would still block impressions when hosted on another domain. Also ads should not distort users perception in order to sell but that's another debate.

We support a backend API, but it's much more complicated to implement, and the client gets more complex as well. We started out with a vision of all backend integrations, but it was impossible to sell to most publishers.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#314
post #18

"In the case of Firefox’s image cache, a tracker can create a supercookie by “encoding” an identifier for the user in a cached image on one website, and then “retrieving” that identifier on a different website by embedding the same image." Clever. And so frustrating that optimisations need to be turned off due to bad actors.

As a fellow engineer, clever! As a user, damn you!

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#315
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineers don't respect any subject outside of STEM, education like this would fall on deaf ears.

That's not true; they respect the sciences. But only sufficiently "hard" ones like chemistry and biology.

You seem to think that the meaning of "STEM" includes anything that anyone applied the word "science" to. But no, the "science" part is precisely the "hard" sciences. E.g. psychology, economics and theology aren't included in STEM.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found this: https://9to5mac.com/2020/09/04/ad-industry-tracking/ "my iPhone 11 Pro was also unique among the more than 2.5 million devices they have tested." Time zone is one possible fingerprint data point.

> Time zone is one possible fingerprint data point. Totally forget that. Oops. Now for the meat of your comment ...and how many have tested their protections so that their testing site recognize that your device is not unique? A very good counterclaim was posted in the comments: I strongly disagree with your findings, Ben. Namely, you list fingerprinting techniques available to browsers, and fail to mention how Safar…

Thanks for the response. It looks like just because the fingerprint is unique doesn't mean that it's accurate or stable.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#317
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern ad networks are essentially the “fax machine flyers” of old: someone you don’t know using your resources and your time, denying you use of your own resources temporarily, to send you something you don’t want. Except now it’s like every “normal” fax page includes 15,000 flyers.

I wonder how many people reading this comment are thinking, "what's a fax machine?" :o) I like the analogy, but I wonder how effective it is on anyone under the age of what, 35?

I'm old enough to remember (like New Coke) ZapMail by FedEx where you would send documents by FedEx and FedEx would Fax it on their equipment to a location near the recipient for physical delivery. Obligatory Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapmail. Hey, most businesses didn't have one of those newfangled FAX machines.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#318

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…

Whitelist/blacklist have their origins in terms from the 1400s and nothing to do with race (they have to do with criminality). Twisting their etymology to fit some kind of racial bias is sort of weird.

And throwing aside 600 years of clarity for "basic manners" also seems rather weird. Sort of like banning the word "engender" because a small minority might find that to be offensive. It isn't clearer to use a different word than has been used for over half a millennium.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#319
post #83

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?

My issue with pihole or any other DNS adblocker is I can't whitelist some website that I love. As evil as ada network, but I still want my favorite site to get some revenue.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#320

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…

GSM yes, but once phones went digital that capability was lost.
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