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Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#721

Post by asddubs »

surround wrote: post #577
avodonosov wrote: post #541

We need to acknowledge also that recognising the user as he moves across pages and domains is sometimes needed to provide valuable services to the user. Therefore, I believe, browsers have to provide a volunteer "tracking" functionality - when a web page reqests 3rd party cookies, a popup is shown to the user with the cookie values, description (as set by the owning domain), the list of domains already permitted to a…

Which valuable services? I’ve had 3rd party cookies entirely disabled for a while now, and I haven’t noticed any services break, not even cross domain logins.

not as common these days, but it's useful for services allowing people to create custom sites like blogger, where you'd want the comment form to be an iframe/embed of some sort that ties to the account of the platform, and the user-content is on a different domain.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#722

Post by fauigerzigerk »

account42 wrote: post #712
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but if it was „incredibly naive“ to download and run JavaScript in the browser sandbox how naive would it have been to download and run native code outside of any sandbox? The browser runtime is what enabled us to use software provided by a huge number of developers of varying aptitude and motivation without putting in place some centralised gatekeeper with its own vested interests.

> Yes but if it was „incredibly naive“ to download and run JavaScript in the browser sandbox how naive would it have been to download and run native code outside of any sandbox? It would be naive to download and run native code for every website you visiti, yes. A few that you trust and where you think that is warranted is a different matter. Running javascript in a sandbox provides the illusion of safety so it gets…

> A few that you trust and where you think that is warranted is a different matter.

We tried that, and the security issues it caused were orders of magnitude more severe than any of the problems caused by defects in an up-to-date browser sandbox. Basically all consumer PCs used to be infested with viruses all the time. It sparked an entire virus scanning industry.

It takes far too much discipline and diligence to make sure that you can trust the motivations and security capabilties of all your software providers. Sandboxing is good. It's the only thing short of the most heavy handed, restrictive and centralised control that has ever worked.

The security issues we have on today's Web are overwhelmingly unrelated to client-side security. The problem is protecting the data that is stored on servers and the incentives created by ad based business models. All of that is equally problematic regardless of whether you run native code or sandboxed JavaScript.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#723

Post by Accacin »

nofunsir wrote: post #611
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…

I agree with simias. What does JS have to do with my VPN? What was wrong with Skype? Still beats the pants off others for quality. I cannot think of much good agressive whitespace, hamburger menus, infinite scrolling, HID hijacking, copy-paste preventing, trackers etc, etc etc, has brought us, besides into the world of Aggressive Ad Arbitrage. Need https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ be mentioned? The real powerhouse w…

You're blaming the language for how people use it. It's like saying C is bad because people use it to write root kits.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#724

Post by cjfd »

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.

It seems to me that the only actual solution is just to make tracking people illegal.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#725

Post by fauigerzigerk »

bipin_nag wrote: post #716
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. JS didn't lower the barrier to programming at all. On the contrary, programming with VisualBasic and SQL was 10 times more accessible and productive than web development. What enabled millions to write software was the availability of…

>JS didn't lower the barrier to programming at all. >But I disagree about lowering the barrier for developers. I think OP meant it as browsers that run JS. The built in console is so useful for testing/practice. You can run JS without any setup on most popular OS - Win/Linux/Mac. You can practice JS in console while viewing YouTube tutorial or following a JS blog/ Mozilla dev page.

I know that's what they meant, but I disagree that it lowered the barrier to creating actual applications or to getting into programming.

Everyone who had MS Office installed back in the 1990s (which was basically everyone) could easily run some quick VB code to try things.

But the difference was that you could also create proper applications with a UI, a database and (optionally!) some glue code.

We just had no good way of distributing our apps. Creating anything collaborative that wasn't restricted to a local network was exceedingly difficult as well.

The Web fixed all that, albeit at the cost of cratering developer productivity, a massive increase in complexity and higher barriers to entry for new devs.

And if you're asking me why the number of developers exploded while the barriers to entry supposedly went up, my answer is that the new opportunities that came with unrestricted worldwide distribution of software trumped the narrower issue of writing that software in the first place.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#726

Post by pornel »

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #648
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.

Ads are frustrating but this can lead to even more irrelevant and therefore more frustrating ads.

Ads were fine when they used page content as the context.

"Personalized" ads are partly a scam to devalue publishers: set a tracking cookie when a user is on an expensive-to-advertise-on website, and then serve ads to the very same user when they visit cheap sites. I'm dumbfounded why reputable publishers put up with this.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#727

Post by ignoramous »

cjfd wrote: post #724
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.

It seems to me that the only actual solution is just to make tracking people illegal.

The only problem with that is the law-makers themselves would kill to have such an excellent tracking apparatus.

The likes of Amazon, Google, and Facebook are the envy of the Government, if anything.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#728

Post by danbruc »

alkonaut wrote: post #705
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Annual average revenue per (active) user (from North America) is about $180 for Google, $150 for Facebook, and $80 for Twitter. As you might expect, Amazon has far higher revenue per user ($700), and Apple is about $140, but they're both more like $30 when you only count their advertising revenue instead of much lower-margin retail and hardware manufacturing businesses. Searching for "ARPU" news will give articles wi…

It's astonishing that the value is so high. I use the internet on N devices for probably 12h a day and I can't imagine I'm worth even a positive amount anywhere. I max out free tiers of OneDrive/DropBox etc, use my free minutes of build time at the dev sites, I use some social media features but I browse Twitter and reddit on custom apps that don't show any ads. I never ever click an ad in an article or search no mat…

I wouldn't say the amount is that high, it's like $50 per month and that in comparison to all the value one gets out of the internet. Sure, things like Wikipedia or some YouTube channels have other revenue streams like donations that are nor accounted for and paid tiers probably subsidize free tiers, but still. And also in comparison to the prices of individual subscriptions for Netflix or YouTube Premium or a news paper like The Guardian which are each often on the order of $10 per month.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#729

Post by tremon »

sjwright wrote: post #700
CogitoCogito wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation seems appropriate.

"Regulation" mandated stupid cookie consent overlays on every damn European website. Thanks, regulation.

Nope, only on those that intend to abuse your personal information.
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