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Comment by omginternets | Hacker News Reader

I'm not an expert in the field, but my understanding is that you can be (partially?) fingerprinted based on the ads you (fail to) download. I also believe such partially discriminating information can be combined with other patterns (time at which you connect, sites visited, etc) to compromise your privacy.

I have no idea if this is problematic in practice, though.

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Considering that Tor Browser users would also on the whole want to probably filter ads to improve their already slow latency, I'm hoping the Tor and µBlock devs can get together and standardise µBlock on all Tor Browsers with a preselected list of filters, which should reduce the ability to fingerprint by analysing the downloads of ads, at least within the set of all Tor Browser users.

There's actually a ticket up currently to do exactly that, integrate uBlock on the default Tor install.

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17569

> µBlock

Just 'uBlock Origin'. You are probably mixing up the names of µTorrent and uBlock Origin.

I, like Santosh83, remember seeing uBlock or uBlock Origin written with the µ. Can't find it on either of their Github sites now, though.

Nope. But I did mean uBlock Origin and instead hastily left out the "Origin" part of its name, which can lead to confusion with the uBlock extension maintained by another developer. Most people though seem to prefer uBlock Origin and that's what I use too. The spellings uBlock and µBlock seem to be used interchangeably on different pages and sites although undeniably uBlock seems by far the commoner variant.

The u in uBlock stands for micro (µ).

That makes logical sense, thanks.

How can anybody track which ads you failed to download? TOR browser has Noscript on by default, as far as I remember.

It's very easy to correlate UUID-stamped page load with no matching ad load on the backend, no script/flash support needed. If you have the most basic cookie support its even easier to correlate multiple ad blocks across numerous page loads, across sites.

Your traffic to websites goes trough a fixed "circuit" (that changes every few minutes). Within a circuit, the exit node sees all outbound connections you make, or don't make.

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