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Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

> Ability to uncloak 3rd-party servers disguised as 1st-party through the use of CNAME record.

I always thought that would be the evolution of ads, but didn't realize it was already fairly widespread.

Maybe it's time for me to look at switching back to Firefox. I ditched them when they pushed so hard for DoH which looks a lot like ad delivery tech to me. I thought Microsoft would give users a good experience with Edge since they should be trying to gain market share, but that was totally wrong. It pushes Microsoft accounts and affiliated products super hard.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a plain, un-Googled, Chromium browser on Windows. I'd prefer something digitally signed and without extra features like Brave, etc. have.

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The only pushback I saw on DoH was from network admins who want DoT so they can MITM/block it easily. Firefox lets you set the DoH endpoint anyways so you can run your own resolver (dnscrypt-proxy or whatever).

It caused a lot of problems for me, because of employees who complained that they couldn't reach anything on the internal network because firefox switched to using the default DoH instead of the system DNS. We configured the canary domain, but the heuristic for using that was pretty buggy in the beginning, and still isn't completely reliable. Sure we can tell them to disable DoH or change the DoH endpoint, but that's one more thing to worry about onboarding. And if you don't already have enterprise policies set up, then configuring that just for DoH is a huge pain.

I'm not sure what size your company is, but Mozilla adds/changes stuff in new releases fairly frequently so you may want to get on the policy train sooner rather than later if your size makes it sensible to do so.

> I ditched them when they pushed so hard for DoH which looks a lot like ad delivery tech to me.

It looks like privacy-enabling tech to me. I don't want my ISP to snoop which domains I visit or hijack DNS requests.

The untouchable foreign databroker that is Google concerns me to a far greater degree than my heavily regulated and monitored ISP whose HQ is only a 30m bike-ride away here in the Netherlands.

Firefox doesn't have Google on their preinstalled DoH provider list. You can go out of your way to configure it.

what about cloudflare?

Yes, Cloudflare is the default in the US.

Super late edit to add: Mozilla signed a contract with CF to put users' data under Mozilla's privacy policy instead of the one on the normal Cloudflare DoH service.

What's the difference between those two?

Most of the world is not Netherlands, though.

Yes I understand that's a distinctive factor, which was the reason for me mentioning it.

Just wanted to point out that different threat models and actor evaluations exist.

Do you trust your ISP or cloudflare more? In the US, I'd probably pick cloudflare too, but I'm happier with our local ISPs who are subject to GDPR and the US has been proven to be problematic in the privacy regard since the snowden leaks.

DoH does not prevent your ISP from seeing the IP addresses of the websites you visit. It only encrypts the requested url. It is not too difficult to figure out which IP addresses are from which websites and block or manipulate them.

Learned first hand when trying to visit adguard.com with DoH enabled at a relative's. Comcast's router blocked the website by recognizing adguard's unencrypted website IP address.

DoH is not really hiding anything from ISP's.

Yes. This can also be done by SNI scanning[0], which is a pretty core function of the web these days.

[0]: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/what-is-sni/

P.S. not sure why your comment got flagged. It seems perfectly reasonable to me.

This seems so curious to me. "I was concerned some policy in Firefox looked a little like ad delivery, so I switched to a platform which is 100% ad delivery all the time."

But that aside, maybe Vivaldi is what you're looking for?

“ I ditched them when they pushed so hard for DoH which looks a lot like ad delivery tech to me. ”

Agree Mozilla’s move to enable this practically by default with just a slimy quick pop up message about privacy was weak

Setting the default resolvers to cloudflare was also weak.

They even presented the problem in a misleading way. How is centralizing DNS requests to a major provider like cloudflare improving privacy. Ohh because wink wink … Mozilla said that they got privacy “guarantees”. Your local ISP will no longer snoop but instead we will just sent all requests to one of the largest resolving services in the world.

> I always thought that would be the evolution of ads, but didn't realize it was already fairly widespread.

Once edge workers get cheap enough I wonder how we'll be able to stop ads at all. Everything but the bootstrap page could be randomized per user and all fronted by the same 1st-party website.

Think encrypt the real request needed into the url to the edge worker it de-crypts that payload and does the request. Everything except the content will look identical to the users computer.

One of the things that uBlock Origin does and Google is trying to kill is detecting and blocking ads based on content & display attributes, not just urls.

https://chromium.woolyss.com

Just one man's opinion here but on these-

It pushes Microsoft accounts

I use it on my work machine without an account, and there's no push that I could ever see. Seems about the same on that front as anything else, including Firefox. I also have a Firefox account. I do use a MS account on my personal Edge install.

and affiliated products super hard.

You would think this is a negative, but it opened my eyes and saved me a lot of money. In fact, Edge's shopping features were something I wish I had for years prior. I liked it enough that I went looking for best-in-class options, and ended up installing Honey. I now rely on both Honey and Edge's shopping features to save me money.

I would go so far as to say if I had to leave Edge and use a browser without Edge's shopping features, I'd be one of the features pulling me back to Edge.

Honey is a tracker you willingly install[1]. If that doesn't concern you, I can understand why the privacy features of Firefox aren't too appealing either.

[1] https://www.datarequests.org/blog/honey-data-collection/

Edit: When did we stop calling this stuff "spyware"? When it became widespread enough to no longer be remarkable?

I used Firefox for 19 years without wavering. Honey does require information for their services. It saves me hundreds of dollars which is very real to me. Do you use any Google products? I wouldn't cast stones from a glass house.

I keep Tor Browser installed at all times for best-in-class privacy alongside Edge. It blows away Firefox on that front.

If I wanted to make the tradeoffs for a more privacy-oriented daily browser, I wouldn't reach for Firefox in 2022. I'd use Brave.

The other day I tried to open Quick Assist to help my elderly father find out where his email was. Couldn't access it without signing in to a Microsoft account. That's not the exact situation you're referencing, but speaks to the length and breadth of the effort MS is undertaking to force you to log in to MS.

I've never used Quick Assist, first time I've heard of it actually. It looks like there's two versions, the preinstalled one and the MS Store version which the preinstalled version points you to. I've always used and recommended Teamviewer for this sort of stuff.

I can't say I fault MS on that one, but people will any way without thinking about it. They're providing a service. Teamviewer certainly requires an account.

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