Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox expands fingerprint protections

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 177 posts

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#51

Post by kube-system »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #50
kube-system wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is any value of [x] for the monthly bandwidth usage you could pick that malicious users cannot afford, but legitimate users could not hit.

That's what early warnings are for. It's an easy problem to solve... except by the NYT.

How would a warning fix the problem?

"Hi, I see you've read [x-y] amount of news of new this month, we're going to cut you off at [x]"

What's the correct value of x?

If [x] is greater than or equal to the total amount of news published, then scrapers need one account.

If [x] is less than the total amount of news published, then you have now made it so legitimate subscribers cannot read all of the news.

Also, you have made things easier for scrapers, because they can determine how many accounts they need by dividing the total amount by [x].

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#52

Post by gpvos »

naIak wrote: post #40
deltoidmaximus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a reason to force all these bot checks on logged in accounts that are paying you money other than insanity? Surely you could just have a max monthly bandwidth limit per account and just stop worrying about this?

They probably don’t want you paying once and using that subscription to scrape the website. Which is reasonable.

Again, they have your login cookie and are already tracking what you've seen. Just start captcha'ing after several dozen articles per day.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#53

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

nutjob2 wrote: post #28
dmix wrote: post #15

I use FF and I paid for NYTimes. I was logged in, yet NYTimes constantly flagged my browser with a persistent captcha I couldn't bypass for months (across 2 different machines). It thought I was a bot because of the privacy features. So I cancelled my subscription using my phone.

Just use Bypass Paywalls Clean. Paying for a subscription is up to you.

I just open dev tools and look at the file in the network tab. You can read it the response sub-tab usually.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#54

Post by tmtvl »

hku333 wrote: post #7
tmtvl wrote: post #2

I'm already using CanvasBlocker, Decentraleyes, and the NoScript Security Suite; but getting more protections will be nice. Even if it may take a while for them to land in Waterfox.

You are actually easier to track using these addons. By installing Canvasblocker, Decentraleyes and NoScript you are providing more entropy to trackers and thus making it easier to track you. Imagine how many people worldwide block specifically Canvas, have weird looking network requests to certain js libs and have JS disabled for some (/all) scripts combined with your general setup (window size, font size, and many…

Without an ad blocker and JavaScript blocker the average website would be 100GB in size and take several years to load. If I really cared about tracking protection I would just not use the regular internet and stick to Gemini. CanvasBlocker is just because the Tor browser itself has one implemented (source: https://2019.www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#...>) so I figured I might as well.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#55

Post by rolph »

cjkaminski wrote: post #33
charcircuit wrote: post #30

>Having a unique fingerprint means fingerprinters can continuously identify you invisibly This is not right. If you have a unique fingerprint every time someone tries to fingerprint you, then they have to do extra work to try and figure out which are the same. If you make it always be the same you've made the fingerprinter's job much easier.

Agreed. And this technique becomes more effective as the number of people using it increases. It's easy to match up randomized fingerprints if only one person is doing it, but quite hard when thousands or millions are doing it.

dont use randomized fingerprints, spoof actual fingerprints, randomly.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#56

Post by yborg »

In my case the single largest contributor to my fingerprint is ... canvas size. I run full screen with a custom Firefox setup that basically makes my canvas size unique :/ The "protection" Firefox uses for this is to always open a new window at a default size, which does nothing in my case since my toolbar config still makes the canvas size unique.

It would be really useful to have something that dithers the reported canvas size by 5 or 10 pixels in different containers to add noise there.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#57

Post by nicce »

Unfortunately, Cloudflare and other protections will keep working even less than they used to. I have started to not use Cloudflare protected websites because they don’t work with Firefox. But that is a fight I am going to lose.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#58

Post by [deleted] »

cowpig wrote: post #23
shevy-java wrote: post #21

I tested firefox recently. It had some AI summary button or something that was new. I instantly wanted to eliminate this from the UI but I don't know how to do that. I guess it is possible? But it probably requires some time and research; the thing I don't need or want this, it just takes away space. Then I remembered why I no longer use firefox. I believe we, as users, need to take back the open web. The days of som…

I use Firefox because it is better than Chrome, which is the only alternative I see. Do you use something else?

[deleted]

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#59

Post by rpdillon »

kvirani wrote: post #42
rpdillon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The New York Times is like a microcosm of the publishing industry. They seem to spend the majority of their effort on protecting their intellectual property. I'd rather they use those resources to improve their reporting, particularly about technical topics, but alas.

We just down know from the outside how much revenue they would lose by redirecting that effort though.

That's fair. I was a little bit sloppy with my previous comment; I was mentally conflating their lawsuits about intellectual property with their dark patterns that prevent people from unsubscribing. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but five years ago they were a nightmare to disentangle yourself from.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235341

They actually published an op-ed criticizing Amazon for using dark patterns to prevent people from leaving Amazon Prime while they were using those exact same patterns themselves.

https://www.nirandfar.com/cancel-new-york-times/

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#60

Post by adamc »

DavideNL wrote: post #36
instagib wrote: post #34

One thing I found that broke tracking algorithms was the ‘every tab is a new random profile’ extension. I can’t remember the name as I haven’t used it in a while and it broke a lot of logins. They could not build a profile on you and it would break their system of tracking user login per device.

You probably mean Temporary Containers…? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

Thanks to both of you. That seems valuable.
Post reply on HN