Firefox to ship 'network partitioning' as a new anti-tracking defense | Hacker News Reader

Firefox to ship 'network partitioning' as a new anti-tracking defense

zdnet.com

72 pointsconductor20 comments

Time money and resources are being spent on a protection from something that should be regulated out of existence. We are now actively innovating against these tracking technologies which we are finding adversarial to our rights to privacy. Isn’t it time we ask our governments to do something about this?

Legislation isn’t robust

How do you mean 'robust'? Taxes are dodged but that's not a good argument against tax law.

It's an argument that both will be needed, so not so much "time, money and resources being spent" (wasted?)

legislation - and enforcement - is the best way we as a society can declare some things off-limits. what does it mean for it not to be robust?

Computer viruses, piracy, and various forms of spam are illegal and can carry harsh sentences. We all see plenty of it.

That people occasionally get caught probably does discourage some of it, but there's obviously plenty to go around. At some point you have to accept that the law won't get rid of some of this stuff.

So, since some will choose to continue to break the law, we should just give up, do away with the laws, and make it a free for all?

That makes absolutely no sense at all.

People have more than one tool, because a single tool isn't the solution to every problem.

The law helps with many social problems, but it's rather frequent to hit cases where it's either outright innefective, or the cost of enforcement exceeds the cost of the problem itself.

> Computer viruses, piracy, and various forms of spam are illegal and can carry harsh sentences. We all see plenty of it.

However, you can't expect to see a virus on every single page you visit on the web, because it isn't the norm. The presence is severely reduced because it is illegal.

I mean, that was kind of the norm 10-15 years ago, during the interim between viruses becoming illegal and browser sandboxes being worth anything

Seems to me making it impossible rather than simply illegal was a much stronger driver of virus-free web browsing.

Legislation is a non-starter because there was always be a little island country that will allow whatever you want to exist legally on the internet as long as it generates piles of cash.

How does it get the cash? How do you get the data?

Some services get away by being small enough that persecuting them costs too much but overall, laws work.

You can always make it illegal to use the services in other countries.

It might be good for it to be regulated away, but that's just going to be ... about 100x the effort.

At some point, we will have true network partitioning, where you connect with a different IP address to every domain. With IPv6 and a cooperative ISP / OS / Browser, this would be possible today. VPNs could also work work with browser makers to implement this as a fancy kind of NAT.

> where you connect with a different IP address to every domain

That's Tor for you.

Doesn’t TOR keep you on same IP for the duration of the session?

For every site, Tor keeps the same final IP (or more correctly, the circuit). However, you can press a button to create a new circuit at any time.

For different sites, Tor creates a different final IP/circuit.

Why can't this be fixed by fake slowing down/randomizing cache reads? Are they wasting actual bandwidth making HTTP requests for already cached content?

Imagine that you had a time-delayed cache lookup. If a web server sent different payloads (perhaps a time stamp) on each request, and set the cache control header to be fairly long, you could determine if something was coming out of a shared cache, or if it was fresh. Hence, we need it to be cached per site (unfortunately)

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