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Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#431

Post by 8note »

shakna wrote: post #318
daotoad wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 differen…

Blacklist/whitelist are not used consistently, so the clarity is not there. You can't see whitelist and consistently know whether it's going to be an allow list or a deny list

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#432

Post by bradly »

WC3w6pXxgGd wrote: post #99
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…

Why not use Brave? It has all of this, with Fingerprint protection turned on by default.

With Brave you will still see personalized ads on some sites which I do not want see

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#434

Post by falsaberN1 »

mikl wrote: post #409
tyingq wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you're saying. But, for example, all of the new DNS queries for things like jQuery and Google Analytics surely add up to something noticeable.

Statistically significant: maybe. Noticeable to humans: almost certainly not.

On a proper internet connection, you are right, but when that connection is unstable or capped, it's extremely noticeable.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#435

Post by StavrosK »

xeonoex wrote: post #176
warent wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Pi-Hole/NextDNS also blocks adds in most apps. I used NextDNS (which has a limit on the free tier), and recently switched to pihole running on my home server. I also use ZeroTier to connect to my server directly even when I am not on my local network to still use it as the DNS server. Works great.

I paid them, $20/yr is quite good and I can add my parents' house, my in-laws' house, etc on the same plan and manage them all centrally.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#436

Post by alentist »

masa331 wrote: post #429
simias wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the root of all evil here is Javascript being opt-out instead of opt-in (and effectively mandatory for a big chunk of the internet these days). Letting any website and their friends (and the friends of their friends) run turing complete code on the client PC probably sounded reasonable when the web was created but it seems incredibly naive in hindsight. It's not as bad as ActiveX and other plugins, but it's…

No no no. The problem isn't JavaScript or web capabilities here. It's the companies and people who use them in evil ways. I would rather handle that even if it's much much harder.

Yes yes yes. Luckily for us, these problems are technically solvable, no handling (?) "evil ways" (?) needed. The latter proposal is both ill-defined and a waste of time and resources. Better to spend those resources on designing more secure systems.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#437

Post by jamiequint »

makecheck wrote: post #89
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…

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.

This is a terrible analogy. Nobody forced you to go to the website that voluntarily decided to include the trackers.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#438

Post by jamiequint »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #403
sbarre wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really confused by this position. How do you propose that companies should promote their products and services, if not through advertising? Are you somehow suggesting that they should just sit there and hope that people who have never heard of their product independently decide they happen to want or need that product and seek it out, unprompted? You say "people part with their money for things they wouldn't thi…

> Are you somehow suggesting that they should just sit there and hope that people who have never heard of their product independently decide they happen to want or need that product and seek it out, unprompted? Yeah, it's even got a name: shopping.

It must be hard to be this naive ^^

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#439

Post by conradfr »

PaulHoule wrote: post #122
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…

That idea of having JS files hosted elsewhere always struck me as a Girardian scam (e.g. "everybody else does it") and always getting voted down when I showed people the reality factor. Nobody seemed to think it was hard to host a file before this came along, just as nobody thought it was hard to have a blog before Medium. Of course this creates the apocalyptic possibility that one of these servers could get hacked (…

Wasn't that also because before http2 browsers were limiting the number of concurrent requests to a domain?

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#440

Post by ogre_codes »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #326
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…

To me, there is no such thing as an “ethical ad”. You are trying to steal my attention, my time. You don’t get to do that. My time on Earth is limited and you don’t get a millisecond of it if I can help it. If I want to buy something, I seek it out. Anything else is a waste of my time and a waste of the advertisers money. I long ago decided to throw out every piece of physical ad mail I receive without even glancing…

I'm pretty frustrated by advertising too, and some of it is particularly egregious, but at the moment, there is really no other way for many publishers to get paid.

I'm curious, how many services do you subscribe to and pay for content? I pay for a few ad free resources, but certainly a lot of the sites I enjoy don't get my $$.

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