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

Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 786 posts

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#631

Post by notatoad »

rangibaby wrote: post #552
notatoad wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "problem" with that solution is that users are very willing to click any button necessary to achieve their goal, and in any dialog that prompts to allow tracking in order to achieve something else, most people will click allow. Personally I don't think this is a problem, and people should be allowed to make that choice. But most of HN seems to disagree with me there, and feels that users need to be protected from…

It’s not much choice when the site will find some way of forcing or tricking you to allow tracking

Tracking is the cost. You have the choice to use the service and allow tracking, or not use the service.

Websites force you to accept tracking in the same way the store forces you to pay for your groceries

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#632

Post by throwaway525142 »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #624
musicale wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what tempers my enthusiasm for WebAssembly - it will undoubtedly be used for all sorts of user-hostile and malicious activity.

...and with zero accountability. Any website can push 10MB of obfuscated, debugger-resistant, code on your computer. Obfuscated to resist ad-blockers and anti-tracking features.

asm.js was a thing before WebAssembly, with the same downsides, except maybe a little less browser support for debugging, inspecting, etc. asm.js was able to exist without browser support in Chrome, so WebAssembly support doesn't really bring anything new to the table.

At least that's how I understand it, care to give ideas why it's not a positive change? :)

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#633

Post by floxy »

tempestn wrote: post #621
floxy wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reason to not go all-in and just use Tor? That's what I've been doing lately, although I'm not a web engineer, so I may not be doing the optimal thing.

I've found Tor to be too slow for everyday use. Plus you'll regularly get hit with (sometimes near-impossible) recaptchas.

Oh yes, there are definite downsides. There are plenty of sites that won't show you anything. I've taken the tact that there is more on the net than I could possibly view in a million lifetimes and just move on. I could see some people taking exception here. And yes, I don't bother with google's captcha, since if that shows up, it'll most likely never work, even if you keep trying. Some of the others will let you pass after one successful test. I don't find tor to be too slow though.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#634

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

jamiequint wrote: post #438
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ^^

I assume you meant to reply to sbarre

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#635

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

sbarre wrote: post #424
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And how do you know about the existence of a product to go shop for in the first place, if not through advertising and promotion? Or do you have infinite time to go browse every single store in your city on the odd chance that you'll see something you want?

There are these wonderful things now called search engines. And they existed before online advertising was tied to search, so before you say search engines would not exist without advertising attached to search queries, think again.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#636

Post by waste_monk »

scrollaway wrote: post #586
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…

> it seems incredibly naive in hindsight Oh stop with the dramatics, please. JS has brought us an immense amount of innovation on the web. It has lowered the barrier of entry to programming and introduced tens of millions of people to the world of development. If you're on HN the odds are that directly or indirectly, JS is one of the reasons you have a job today, and that you can execute it remotely. And today specif…

Good things are happening in spite of JS, not because of it. It's a silly language, the type system is atrocious, and the entire ecosystem is a joke (look at the left-pad incident).

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#637

Post by sgustard »

madeofpalk wrote: post #591
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…

IIRC browsers (chrome and/or safari?) haven’t cached assets like that cross origin for years .

That's cache partitioning in Chrome. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2020/10/http-cache...

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#638

Post by scrollaway »

waste_monk wrote: post #636
scrollaway wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it seems incredibly naive in hindsight Oh stop with the dramatics, please. JS has brought us an immense amount of innovation on the web. It has lowered the barrier of entry to programming and introduced tens of millions of people to the world of development. If you're on HN the odds are that directly or indirectly, JS is one of the reasons you have a job today, and that you can execute it remotely. And today specif…

Good things are happening in spite of JS, not because of it. It's a silly language, the type system is atrocious, and the entire ecosystem is a joke (look at the left-pad incident).

Typescript has an excellent type system and one of the best development environments the entire dev world can use. You know what ecosystem it's a part of? The JS one. That "entire" one you're talking about has produced superb work such as React, V8, is pretty much responsible for Rust existing, and so on.

JS has dumb flaws. It doesn't mean anything is happening "in spite" of it. If anything, innovation is happening thanks to JS AND in spite of its flaws. But don't think for a second we would have even one tenth of the developers we have at our disposal today if JS and the internet didn't massively lower that barrier of entry. And less developers means less progress overall in the entire industry, not just less left-hand libraries.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#639

Post by shakna »

8note wrote: post #431
shakna wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't believe I have ever seen a single example of a whitelist not being a list of exemptions. Nor can I seem to find any.

Nor can I find any example where blacklist is not a list of denied subjects. A blacklisted person, website or process is immediately clear within their context.

Where the clarity is lacking is not clear to me. However the mismatch between "allow list" and "whitelist", is. The latter seems to have a different meaning altogether.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#640

Post by nl »

waste_monk wrote: post #636
scrollaway wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it seems incredibly naive in hindsight Oh stop with the dramatics, please. JS has brought us an immense amount of innovation on the web. It has lowered the barrier of entry to programming and introduced tens of millions of people to the world of development. If you're on HN the odds are that directly or indirectly, JS is one of the reasons you have a job today, and that you can execute it remotely. And today specif…

Good things are happening in spite of JS, not because of it. It's a silly language, the type system is atrocious, and the entire ecosystem is a joke (look at the left-pad incident).

The criticism is about an executable/scripting code platform in the browser as an opt-out - nothing specific about the semantics of JS.
Post reply on HN