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Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

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Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#521

Post by fimbulvetr »

simias wrote: post #422
Jonnax wrote: 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.

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…

Somewhat off topic but have you see all of the recent (2 years) malware using webassembly? It's difficult to disable in chrome, somewhat difficult to disable in firefox, and no extensions seem to help. I'd love make it as easy to disable as JS.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#522

Post by dathinab »

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…

> Per-site caching negates the principal selling point of centrally-hosted JS and resources

It doesn't or more correctly the benefit wasn't really a think in most cases.

I will not start the discussion her again but on previous hacker news articles about this topic you will find very extensive discussions about how in practice the caches often didn't work out well for all kinds of reasons and how you still have a per-domain cache so it anyway mainly matters the first time you visit a domain but not later times and how the JS ecosystem is super fragmented even if it's about the same library etc. etc.

> cause it reduces the value that unscrupulous free CDN providers can derive from their "properties".

Not really, the value of a CDN is to serve content to the user from a "close by" node in a reliable way allowing you to focus on the non static parts of your site (wrt. to traffic balancing and similar).

Shared caches technically never did matter that much wrt. CDN's (but people used it IMHO wrongly as selling point).

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#523

Post by saagarjha »

spijdar wrote: post #17
beervirus wrote: post #2

Firefox is so good. It's a continual source of amazement for me that a majority of HNers are using a browser made by the largest data gobbler in the world, instead of one that actually tries to prevent spying on users.

It's probably one of the most obscure reasons, but keep Chromium around because it's the only web browser with a JIT-backed javascript engine on ppc64le. Firefox has to run everything interpreted, which is actually fine for most sites, but bogs down on JS heavy web app type things. On a much less niche side of things, a lot of web apps like Teams, Zoom, and probably many others are only fully functional on Chromium,…

It's kind of sad that WebKit doesn't support it…

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#524

Post by saagarjha »

dang wrote: post #503
beervirus wrote: post #2

Firefox is so good. It's a continual source of amazement for me that a majority of HNers are using a browser made by the largest data gobbler in the world, instead of one that actually tries to prevent spying on users.

> a majority of HNers are using a browser made by How do you know what browser the majority of HNers are using?

I'm curious: what is the browser that the majority of Hacker News users are using?

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#525

Post by adrr »

ssss11 wrote: post #470
adrr wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people didn’t want ads it wouldn’t be a multi billion business. Also your analogy is wrong. Your browser won’t execute code unless it requests it. Fax machine spam you don’t have do anything except have it connected to a live telephone connection. It’s more like complaining that your sole of your shoes is being worn out more because grocery stores put the milk in the back forcing you to walk past items you don’t i…

Often something is a multi billion dollar industry that people don’t want! Perhaps you’re invested in the ad industry. No one else wants ads buddy.

Not in ads but I know they are quite effective. Most startups can attribute their growth to the effectiveness of digital advertising. Robinhood was driving app installs for $10 each while E*TRADE and Ameritrade were paying $1000 per customer.

Most of that VC cash startups raise is spent on marketing. I don’t understand why people have such negative perception of ads especially on a VC run news site. All the ycomb companies drops tens of millions on digital advertising.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#526

Post by spiralx »

toast0 wrote: post #484
ACow_Adonis wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what on earth is banking doing over there in the US? I wouldn't know how to write a cheque these days if I wanted to, and the only cheque I've seen in the last 10 years or so is from my (now deceased) grandmother in-law sending birthday money to my wife. I'm guessing this is why several US payment companys and start-ups just don't make any sense to me: "make payments easier!" but it's hard for me to understand how to…

Banking in the US has first mover disadvantage. Because of how and when it got computerized, it's hard to move it forward again. There's no desire for sweeping changes, everything has to move slowly now. There are several personal transfer services (PayPal is ancient and fits the mold), but none have a lot of penetration. I think Zelle? is deployed through bank integration, and may end up with a lot of users as a res…

The first digital computers were used by banks within years of each other - 1955 for BoA in the USA, 1958 for BNP in France and 1959 for Barclays in the UK. And those machines merely took over from existing calculating systems that had been in place for a good couple of decades.

US banks suck for a lot of reasons but part of it is that culturally and regulatorily the entire financial/banking/commercial environment in the US is very conservative. And there's not much in the way of pressure to make changes either - whether internally from competition and regulation or externally from the need to interact with other countries. Like broadband, consumer banking is basically an oligopoly that will quite happily plod along providing the same service as long as it can.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#527

Post by morvita »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #321
morvita wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not OP, but I have my browser setup to block trackers only, nothing that's billed as an ad-blocker. I use Firefox with Strict Enhanced Tracking Protection [0] and Privacy Badger [1] as an extra layer of protection. Some sites, mostly news orgs, complain that I'm blocking ads, but inevitably these are the sites Privacy Badger reports 20+ trackers blocked. I'm happy to see ads online, I'm just not willing to sacrif…

Why not just block ads, too? Do you really think advertising is ethical at any level? Because I do not. If I want to buy something, I seek it out. Anything else is like junk snail mail: a waste of my time and your money.

The short answer: I am not anti-advertising, so I don't block ads that respect me.

I don't love advertising in many of it's forms, but taken from the viewpoint of those who make money from ads (i.e. content creators), it is one of the best ways out there for them to make a living. Platforms like Patreon are great for some folks, but not everyone can make a living off of sponsorship from their viewers. But, I am not willing to sacrifice my own privacy to allow someone else to make money, especially given that we have tonnes of examples of non-privacy-invading advertising that works.

I listen to 8-10 hours of podcasts a week and I generally find the ads on them, usually where the host does an ad read and includes a discount code, to be far more useful and relevant to me than the hyper-targeted ads backed by 20 tracking scripts I see on news sites. Another example, many of the indie tech news sites I read (e.g. Daring Fireball or Six Colors) will have a weekly sponsor that will have an advertising post or two interspersed with their regular content. I'm happy to take 2-3 minutes out of a 30 minute podcast episode to listen to a couple ad reads or see a brief write-up of a sponsor's product as I'm scrolling through the week's tech news. What I'm not happy to do is have my web browser load a dozen tracking scripts in the background when I open a news article and have flashing pictures deliberately trying to distract me from what I'm reading.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#528

Post by monopoledance »

ogre_codes wrote: post #492
monopoledance wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising destroys everything. If something is based on ad revenue, it goes to shit ultimately. The latest casualty was podcasts. It's revolting. Ad-based businesses need to be boycotted until this disease is in lasting remission.

> The latest casualty was podcasts. It's revolting. Hmm? Yes, there are adverts on all the podcasts I listen to. Many of my favorites offer members only ad-free versions. Usually I suffer through the ad supported versions because the adverts are easy enough to skip. Some podcasts have too many adverts or annoyingly inserted advertising. Those are pretty 1 and done. No point listening to them. IMO the (current) podcas…

I absolutely don't respect having my weir podcast-friendship relationship with the host exploited by fully integrated ad pieces whispered to me in a trusted voice. That. Is. Sick.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#529

Post by 725686 »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #468
huron wrote: post #466

From a purely web browsing experience the first iPad 'should be' powerful enough to browse ANYTHING out there these days. But it can't. The last few models will increasingly have the same issues as the sheer volume of muck and cruft that's included with the advertising gack just continues to explode. I'm definitely of the opinion that our web browsing devices are marketing tools that we are allowed to use for media c…

The first iPad sucked a whole bunch. Only 256mb RAM especially hurt. But I hear what you’re saying.

I beg to differ. Of course if you compare it with today's spec it sucks... its been more than 10 years since launch! I can still use my iPad 1 to watch Netflix and play some old games I like (i.e. Carcassonne). The battery still works pretty good. I would say that the iPad 1 rocked, and should be able to browse today's web ... except it can't because of the amount of cruft that is pushed our thoughts nowadays.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#530

Post by michaelmior »

grishka wrote: post #447
michaelmior wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> never see an ad again I wish that were true. Although uBlock Origin does a good job, some ads definitely still make it through. There are also some sites that detect ad blockers and refuse to let you in unless you disable it. There are workarounds for some of these, but it's still a bit of a mess.

> There are also some sites that detect ad blockers and refuse to let you in unless you disable it. That, and when there's an email subscription popup, is when the one-click JS toggle extension comes out. Can't detect anything if it can't run any code in your browser.

It can "detect" if JS is disabled (by loading content via JS) so this doesn't always work.
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