Comment by gzer0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gzer0 | Hacker News Reader

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Increasingly, the only solution I see to this is Apple's Private Relay [1].

"When Private Relay is in use, the user’s device opens up a connection to the first internet relay (also known as the “ingress proxy”).

As the user browses, their original IP address is visible to the first internet relay and to the network they are connected to. However, the website names requested by the user are encrypted and cannot be seen by either party.

The second internet relay (also known as the “egress proxy”) has the role of assigning the Relay IP address they’ll use for the session, decrypting the website name the user has requested and completing the connection.

The second internet relay has no knowledge of the user’s original IP address and receives only enough location information to assign them a Relay IP address that maps to the region they are connecting from, conforming to the IP Address Location preference they selected in Private Relay settings."

[1] https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/iCloud_Private_Relay_Over...

I don't trust Apple; they are shady AF and I'm convinced they are hard at work building an AD empire to rival Google and Facebook behind the scenes. Their so-called "privacy" moves are very clearly designed to limit Facebook's and Google's ability to profit off their platform giving themselves an advantage: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/08/07/apple-a...

That said, Private Relay has some interesting ideas, maybe a few trustworthy VPN providers adopt some of them.

I don't think this is a solution, since modern fingerprinting methods go far, far beyond IP address.

Apple Private Relay runs on iDevices, which are almost all identical.

Panopticon still seems to think my browser is pretty unique, and I am browsing with an iDevice.

Not to current fingerprinting methods, they are not.

Apple's Private Relay is great, but it won't help with server-side tracking (which is not based on IPs)

To what is a VPN a solution? It prevents IP tracking, but that's it. The rest of what is described here still works.

"Private Relay uses both the CONNECT and CONNECT-UDP methods in HTTP/3 to set up connections quickly. For connections to websites that support TLS or QUIC, the initial TLS handshake messages are sent in the same set of data as the proxy request"

Would this not hinder the proposed mechanism discussed in the article?

Edit: forgive me, for my knowledge of networking is limited and I'd like to learn more if I am incorrect.

I fail to see how this is any different (for the purposes of getting around google) than any other VPN or proxy service out there. The proposed mechanism is just using a script that comes from the same server as the main website with perhaps slightly changed up code and a different file name to trick up adblockers. It can still fingerprint you without your actual ip address, as it collects data clientside.

I don't really have a great knowledge of the Tor Network but is that not really similar to a Tor Relay?

Tor relays are identifiable.

And are blocked or rate-limited by many websites.

That said, if a majority of interesting Web traffic transited Tor, that behaviour would likely change.

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