Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewstuart2 | Hacker News Reader

Why do I always get a bad feeling about the motivations behind stuff like this? I want to believe it's for better privacy and security, but it's being driven by a corporation or two, and that makes me 100% suspicious. Like, for example, suddenly Edge is no longer respecting local DNS options and my pihole protects one fewer device from the real dangers to privacy. I don't want to be cynical so often, but this really doesn't feel like a benevolent move. Yeah, it's conditional at the moment, but as with Chrome and manifest v3, among many other examples, I'm losing my faith that anything with the potential to increase ad revenue will remain turned off for long.

View on HN

The reason you have a bad feeling is it gives the FBI/FEDS a single point to collect your data, with a man-in-the-middle attack that you will have no idea is there.

This is absolute BS they're implementing this.

Isn‘t this what they did with Skype (centralize it)?

Yup.

Maybe a dumb question, but isn't that already a given when using a browser? To me it always seemed a bit absurd to use VPN as it basically just gives another person all your info, but just assumed browsers and the big 5 just got most of the data anyway.

The only thing I can see working is pollution, pollution of our data. There are some current extensions that do some of that, but they are likely not enough and what we really need is a kind stream of data and requests that your own requests are simply merged into.

The thing is that it would need to be smart enough to prevent pattern recognition, e.g., it cannot just be random data because your specific searches and string of searches or actions will stand out quite obviously.

Yes, it would place a severe tax on the internet and a few things could be done to minimize that, but I currently do not see any other better option.

I could see it implemented where your activities online are merged with and threaded into those of related or similar communities, e.g., be it family and friends, the YC community, or a combination of different groups. The effect would come from the proximity to similar but not exact activities. To use a common example, if your legal free speech activities could make you a target, those online activities are muddled and polluted by being merged with other people's legal free speech activities, and your activities would be merged with those of others.

Consider it a kind of mutual compromise of society in order to provide protection/obfuscation in numbers ... the zebra in a herd, if you will. They can't arrest/target everyone if everyone has activity data that looks like they defy the ruling powers.

> The only thing I can see working is pollution, pollution of our data.

this is a terrible and dangerous idea. Nobody cares about the accuracy of the data they collect on you. Stuffing your dossier with random things won't cause anyone to throw it away just because there might be errors in it. Instead all of that data, random/accurate or not, will be used against you all the same.

Your clever browser extension might have been responsible for browsing to a bunch of fast food websites, but your health insurance provider won't care. They'll just see that in your internet history and quietly raise your health insurance premiums anyway.

If your legal free speech activities make you a target, adding more free speech activities to your permanent record just means you'll also now be targeted for those activities on top of your own.

You can't know what will prejudice someone else against you. You might not be gay, or Muslim, or a heavy drinker, or an Andrew Yang supporter, but your browser extension pulls in the wrong data that gets you flagged as being one and it could cost you your job, get you denied housing, etc.

You might not be looking into getting an abortion, but anti-abortion activists who buy up the data of anyone who appears to be trying to get one, or looking for support after getting one, will still see you listed and you will still get harassed by them or dragged into a texas court room.

You might not be rich, but data brokers and consumer reputation services will see that you've been interested in expensive vacation spots and online stores will start charging you more than your neighbors for the same items on the assumption that you are.

If you want to try to hide in the crowd look into a VPN or TOR (although be aware device/browser fingerprinting can still get your traffic associated with you). Just please understand that giving others more ammo to use against you isn't helping yourself or anyone else. Adding more and more data to your internet history just increases your risks substantially because no matter if you deserve it or not your life will be impacted in countless ways by the data you surrender and none of that data, "pollution" or genuine, ever goes away.

If you have enough money and time, it might still be useful (and satisfying) to serve society in this way.

You would confuse models currently shooting fish in a barrel.

You would still pick the cheapest insurer (probably one that does not look at your data).

You can live without anyone abusing your privacy in this way.

>what we really need is a kind stream of data and requests that your own requests are simply merged into

having a wife and kids helps with this. or any shared wifi with a guaranteed shitstream for your tunnel to wade through

How are the browsers and the big 5 getting the data? It's not like you can't see what your browser is sending where.

You mean like sending what you type in the address bar to google as you type it.

Like sending usage information to the browser developer.

Like downloading code (experiments) for specific users which can essentially do anything.

Are you debugging your browser 100% of the time and fully analyzing all communications that there is nothing leaked. Is anyone?

No, I'm not, but I trust that if I disable the thing, it will disable.

Besides the unremovable junk they fill on the homepage, now this. Uninstalled and will be moving to Brave

Using a browser that monetizes itself in any way seems like a slippery slope to me. I'd rather use Ungoogled Chromium/Bromite or even LibreWolf if it came down to it. Saying "that's it, I'm moving to Brave!" is basically declaring that you're moving your data from Microsoft(1) to Microsoft(2).

This line of thinking is why Chrome owns most of the internet. No one else can hope to compete because they just get screeched down.

Chrome owns the internet because people like Brave don't develop their own browser engine.

99% of a web browsers end users do not care if their browser uses Servo, Webkit, etc.

I'd guess pretty close to that number don't even know what those are in the first place.

Yes but being able to use all of Chrome's extensions in Brave is a huge win to me. And most Chrome documentation, Q and A, tutorials are mostly relevant to Brave as well. I see Google and other behemoths contributing to an open source project as a good thing. The product may not be where it is today without their help, including paying people to work on a free product. Still, yeah don't trust them.

Companies like google keep expanding the effort needed to write a browser engine to ensure everyone uses their spyware.

Then companies like Apple should stop shrinking their API targets and contribute to the general wellness of computing, for a change.

Can you please give a concrete example of what Apple should do, in your opinion, to expand their API targets? And how is that related to web standards complexity?

People complain about excess functionality being added to web browsers (HTML5, WebXR, WebRTC, etc) and many of these complaints are valid. Web browsers don't need these features, they should be relegated to native apps.

Except they can't be. Native apps don't offer the same freedoms that the web does. And so, we keep stacking technologies on top of web browsers to alleviate the problem. It's a bad situation, and both Google and Apple are gruesomely complicit in making this situation worse.

> Can you please give a concrete example of what Apple should do, in your opinion, to expand their API targets?

Stop browser lockdown. Allow sideloading. You know, the basics of computing that we had figured out since the mid-90s or when we sued Microsoft.

Few people attempt this... Here is one: Ladybird https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...

It's the other way around. Brave uses the Chrome browser engine, because Chrome already developed their own browser engine.

Chrome owns the internet because web standards have become so complex that not even Microsoft can afford to maintain their own browser engine.

>not even Microsoft can afford to maintain their own browser engine

We don't know that. Maybe Microsoft could maintain their own browser engine if Google hadn't provided one on permissive open-source licensing terms that met their needs.

>not even Microsoft can afford to maintain their own browser engine

MS can afford it financially. The desire to put in the effort to is not there.

...that's what they're saying. Microsoft has no reason to build their own browser when they can fork Chrome and preinstall it on their computers.

Microsoft tried with Edge V1, and gave up when Google online services started sabotaging it.

They gave up way too easily though. I don't think they ever had an interest in actually making a good browser engine. They've never managed one in their entire history. Microsoft love mediocrity, the "just good enough" mindset. Nobody takes their products on because they really excel at what they do. Just because they have a huge installed base, they're not so bad there's really a problem to use them and they integrate with everything else (e.g. Windows) nicely. For example Slack is so much better than that turd called Teams but nobody wants to pay the extra because Teams is free with O365 and user frustration doesn't cost anything on the bottom line.

This is why Apple really came out of the blue with Steve Jobs' razor focus on quality above all. Microsoft's goal is never to be 'best in class'. Because they don't need to be. People will buy it anyway.

So what's the solution? I hate this status quo as much as you do, and standing here in a Mexican Standoff is not viable forever. You're right. "The web" as a platform has been twisted and perverted beyond real usability at this point. There is no path forward where we undo Google's damage and preserve the qualities of the web we enjoy today. So, how do we fix this?

The solution (to me) is simple - fix native app distribution. Make platform targets operate the same as they used to, and give people control over their computer again. The only ones preventing us from a platform-agnostic utopia is Apple and Google, both of whom profit off the artificial difficulty of distributing applications.

So, here we are. Google is poisoning the web while Apple refuses to swallow their pride. Everyone is hurting, and nobody stands to gain anything but the shareholders. A hopeless situation, but let's not pretend like everything here is morally grey.

The solution is already impossible. When Mozilla had browser domination they had a chance to dictate something. The moment Chrome became popular, now another company, just as MS and IE did before, could just do the feature creep of "add feature, subtly break/slow down opposition, get more users that just want browser that works"

For starters, if a company makes a web browser with market share exceeding 50%, and also produces web sites and web apps, if those web sites and web apps to do any sort of user agent testing or require non-standard features of the aforementioned browser, it should be treated as ipso facto monopoly abuse.

Microsoft edge non chromium was fine, but no one used it. So they went chromium based.

> Microsoft edge non chromium was fine, but no one used it. So they went chromium based.

Are people now using Edge because of this change?

Edge has made substantial gains in market share in the past few years. But it's hard to definitively ascribe it to any specific change.

It’s simpler than this, imo. Most users rely on Google Search and Google will Constantly nag the user to try Chrome.

Users, trusting the ad company that provides them free email, search, video, photos etc. will action on the suggestion and install Chrome.

More users gives google the market power to dictate web standards

Exactly. Brave just takes Chromium (from Google) and adds weird crypto stuff to it. None of the Chromium forks are "different browsers" in my eyes. They all depend on upstream for everything important. They couldn't develop the browser on their own.

Just use Firefox. It works just as well as Chrome (*), but it's based on a completely different engine which was built from the ground up.

(*) On desktop at least (on Android I still use a Chromium fork for now)

>Just use Firefox. No. Well, I'm not so rude, so "No, thank you".

>It works just as well as Chrome () Not on anything* I use, it doesn't, so "No....thank you".

Tbf, I do keep trying ff, but...clunky, jeepers! 'Fraid I'll hang on until my Brave jumps it's particular shark and then maybe I'll hop over to something else, but for now, and as long as I can still use UblockO, Brave it is.

Even Opera is looking interesting again....

> Even Opera is looking interesting again....

What browsers have you been daily-driving to come to that conclusion?

> Brave just takes Chromium (from Google) and adds weird crypto stuff to it

That's a really unfair(and untrue) statement. Brave also removes some code they find privacy violating, built in a best in class adblocker, built a full cross-device sync system that works perfectly, some UI tweaks and enhancements, built Tor connectivity in, etc. Probably a lot more that I'm leaving out.

I am def not a fan of crypto or BATs or whatever they were pushing, but you can use it fine ignoring all of that.

To be fair, you can also disable Microsoft's built-in VPN. The problem is trusting people who don't have your best interests at heart, and using Brave products just kicks that can further down the road.

Brave is 100% open source: https://github.com/brave/

Normally this might just be a platitude of the sort, "Go check it for yourself." But in this case that's not what I'm saying. Brave is going to be used by large numbers of tech focused users with a privacy/security bent. And they are also competing against Google who will make sure even the slightest slip by Brave is promoted across the entirety of the web.

That code is scrutinized heavily. That the worst you can find about Brave is people making false statements about crypto stuff (it is entirely optional and opt-in with 0 coercion or dark patterns to push you there) speaks incredibly highly as to the current state of the Browser. Might that change in the future, as you seem to be suggesting? Yip! And when it does there will be a new Brave. But for now they continue to stay on an excellent path forward.

As if chromium wasn't a fork of konqueror

Blink (Chrome) is a fork of WebKit which is a fork of KHTML (Konqueror), but that is a very much different situation. None of the Chromium/WebKit-based browsers are full forks but rather merge custom patches with upstream development. They don't have the development capacity to go against any Google changes except for a few things here and there. Meanwhile Google isn't relying on KDE to develop new features - in fact KDE isn't developing any new KHTML features but instead is switching (or has switched) to WebKit/Blink.

I have at least three sites I use that i have to open in edge since they don't work properly in Firefox. Local bank, credit card issuer, and employer's guest wifi login portal.

Oh my. I wonder what that banking site must be doing for it to not work on Firefox. It's either malice or inconvenience, or both

I use FF and when this happens it's almost always some extension you have installed. Try disabling some extensions and go to those sites again.

If they still don't work, they're doing some messed up stuff on those sites.

The thing I like most about Brave is actually the crypto stuff, and I hate almost all crypto. This is actually a good use case for it - you have a distributed system (users browsing) across untrusted hosts (users).

People like to shit on advertising, but much of the internet exists today because of advertising. Do you think Youtube could exist at that scale without ads? I don't think so, personally. At least, not without another way to monetize.

Brave is the only player providing an alternative monetization strategy. Crypto or not, to me, that is by far the most interesting thing a browser has done in a long, long time.

I don't see a reason to use anything but Firefox on Android. It's got full parity to it's desktop counterpart. It's amazing.

You could also consider the Firefox forks Fennec and Mull.

and allows to install an adblocker

Many sites are broken on non-Google browsers though. But the advantage of being able to use adblockers in Firefox alone outweight that - not even taking privacy into consideration.

I actually use firefox on android for 7 years or so. never experienced broken sites on it. can you please give me some examples of broken sites?

Thinking about it, only internal time reporting tools. Both on my current and prior employer they only worked with Chrome or IE.

I think I overestimate the amount of broken sites due to the adblocker messing them up, not Firefox.

Tangentially related. Using Firefox on Linux for anything Google chat/voice call related is not a very pleasant experience

> (on Android I still use a Chromium fork for now)

What chromium fork is on android and actually better than Firefox for android? I use Firefox for the best possible experience on android and would like to be aware of another option.

I personally use Bromite: https://www.bromite.org/

From my (anecdotal) experience, Bromite is faster than Firefox on my phone, but your mileage may vary.

I was originally using Firefox due to its uBlock Origin support, but Bromite has ad-blocking built-in (unfortunately it's not quite up to par with uBO but it works well enough).

I would suggest that you try both and see which one you prefer.

> Just use Firefox

I want to but in Firefox developer tools there is no option for developer tools to follow new tabs.

Apparently this has been an open bug with Firefox for a while.

But it is what keeps me from using Firefox vs Chromium's full time

Firefox is pretty nice once you beat it into submission. I'd put my money there before Brave.

Honestly I find the defaults plus uBlock Origin and Multi-Account Containers to be fine, no bearing required.

I must have a hundred things that I change on every install. At a bare minimum I'd be disabling pocket, prefetch, and search from the address bar for privacy reasons and then disabling service workers, webgl, and wasm for security reasons.

OTOH, Firefox funding depends almost entirely on Google so they are unlikely to do anything that upsets Google too much.

> Using a browser that monetizes itself in any way seems like a slippery slope to me. I'd rather use Ungoogled Chromium/Bromite or even LibreWolf if it came down to it.

The problem with this approach is that it’s impossible to get a safe binary that isn’t downloaded from “libfree.cxcc.gg” or whatever. The other option being to build from source, which is an absolute nightmare for Chromium.

All of those browsers have signatures available if you question the integrity of your binary. Otherwise this argument isn't any different for the likes of Brave or Chrome even.

> All of those browsers have signatures available if you question the integrity of your binary

Signatures available from whom?

The point being that a web browser is a very special case of software that has to absolutely 100% trustworthy from a reputable commercial entity (that is, someone that can be sued). The only other thing with that level of trust is your operating system.

So my Linux kernel running the majority of the infrastructure of the company I work for is untrustworthy?

Do you not trust kernel.org? Or the GPG signatures of the commits?

What about Mozilla?

As for "someone that can be sued", have you read any of the EULAs of the commercial entities that you think are "reputable" and "100% trustworthy"? You can't sue them.

Similarly, do you trust all of the CAs that have certificates in your OS or browser trust store?

I still have a CD of Netscape Navigator Gold I purchased in a box in a store… long ago enough that was a thing.

Those were the days.

I still test and validate my websites with Netscape 2.x and up.

Any Browser can be a reality.

If I had my billion dollars I would fund a modern intentionally crippled hypertext browser with hard limits on programmability and style complexity.

A shame that you would waste your money on a browser that nobody would use.

I would. I already use FF mainly under a locked-down profile for mere reading. (I use another profile for madatory interactive sites like banking and stuff).

Others like me would. And resource-constrained devices. An eco-system of low-tech sites could emerge with a label signaling them as simple and virtuous.

So you basically want gemini? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

Interesting. But I meant only using a subset of current web stack, and insist on low resource.

The issue I have with Gemini is that it discards 25+ years of established domain knowledge and existing software for something which does not provide any additional functionality over what today's software already offers.

It sounds like you are describing Gemini. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

Gemini is on the other extreme (except for requiring the crypto complexity that comes with TLS). I would prefer something that still lets people express themselves creatively like the early web did. Personally, I think even newer CSS is fine even if more complex than it could be if re-designed - the problem is mostly JS and million different APIs that come with that as well as the expectation that that the browser will be able to execute that JS insanely fast.

Why not just bring back the 486?

Some browsers you may want to try, which support only HTML and CSS:

Dillo

Links

NetSurf

How is Brave Microsoft(2)?

They're both for-profit businesses that will consistently put the user experience behind profitability. Open-source, libre browsers will not.

I'm sure people said the same thing when Edge was in beta. "How is Microsoft Chrome(2)?"

But Brave is also an open-source, libre browser. And the Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company.

(And I think Edge is worse than being Chrome(2).)

well google is removing adblockers from chrome to better monetise the web…

> Using a browser that monetizes itself in any way seems like a slippery slope to me.

Is that a practical sustainable long-term business practice though? Firefox was only able to be free because Google was paying Mozilla. Browsers are some complex software and software developers wanna get paid. I know that the in's and outs of history of browser software has conditioned us to expecting browsers for free but that doesn't reflect the reality of developing the software.

Firefox, with its full complement of full-time developers, could stay alive with a tiny fraction of what Mozilla earns in a year. Most of Mozilla's work is tangential to Firefox at best.

Surely there's space in the browser market for a model akin more to how Wikipedia operates.

> Surely there's space in the browser market for a model akin more to how Wikipedia operates.

Donations by corporations, and edited by powerhungry users (ryulong) and bots?

OK so you do want a business model, it's just a terrible one.

Sounds better than a black-hole cryptocurrency where the devs steal 30% of your transaction 'because they can'

This is part of the problem. Mozilla is diverging too much into dead ends. Instead of focusing on what they do best, Firefox.

That's the thing, it shouldn't be a business practice at all. Browsers are part of the Internet infrastructure and that should not be treated like any other business but be regulated enough to ensure anyone gets fair use of the infrastucture and should rely primarily on public funding.

The Internet being global makes this challenging, and almost all countries (including so-called democracies) wanting to drink as much authoritarian juice as they can get away with does mean that there is plenty of risk here as well. But letting one or a few giant megacorporations entirely dicate the primary intrastructure for information interchange is so much worse.

I don't think any way is unacceptable. I'd be totally happy to pay for the software for example. It's all the sneaky crypto / adware / tracking stuff that I have a problem with.

I'm very glad you mentioned the homepage spam. It's increasingly difficult (and valuable) to live without information overload these days; Edge's forced "news" spam has pushed me away as well.

blocking msn.com via hosts will give you a blank new tab page in Edge, only including an Edge background image, and a search bar leading to your chosen search engine.

You can disable all that from Edge itself, at least on the desktop. When on the new tab page, there's a "Page settings" icon in the top right. If you click on that, there's a bunch of options there regarding what should be present on the page; the bottom-most item is "Content", and if you set it to "Content off", it all goes away.

true, but the default new tab page sets cookies and connects to MS all the time. When blocking msn.com, it loads local resources only.

What is shocking is the content is so low quality it's appalling it came from a big, respected company as Microsoft. A lot of the posts are often clickbaits, and there are ads carelessly interspersed between the posts all over the page.

I know it makes a lot of money for Microsoft but the fact they chose to keep the quality so low really looks bad.

"Respected"? Since when is Microsoft respected?

The company is respected for being so big and being a stable, high performer. Obviously they did a lot in "personal computing" as well

Biz, gov and mil management relies on MSFT; executives, their attorneys and bankers, respect MSFT for doing what they do ($$). Similar to big retail and worse, gambling, the single user is last in line; used and abused individuals.. nobody expects a lot from the individuals involved, and their opinion matters less. Wolves among sheep, basically.

the only unremovable thing that bothers me is the stupid bing points thing that i dont care about. It doesnt encourage me to use bing, it just makes me question how they continue to manage to swipe my queries enough to increase that score.

Edge is a pretty good local pdf reader so I added a firewall rule to stop it connecting to the internet.

Oh you sweet summer child.

Damn you, I just spit out my drink! :-D

Also Epic.

I'm all for pushing for more privacy/etc; but is Brave what we want to advocate for as an alternative? They did some pretty heinous link jacking relatively recently. I'm not sure FF/(/chromium) have been caught doing anything worse than that yet.

Firefox with uBlock Origin and HTTPS only works beautifully with Pocket disabled.

Only thing I have to pull out Chrome for is corporate intranet.

Or the privacy focused Librewolf (fork of Firefox)

It's because they are shareholder-driven, not customer-driven.

Clueless shareholders on the 59th floor of JP Morgan who don't even use Edge see "oooh VPN, me like buzzwords" and upvote the stock.

I work for a very large corporation who has decided the default browser will be Edge. Getting another browser installed on your machine takes an act of congress and several upper level approvals.

Does this mean they will also have the ability to collect corporate data from the browser in companies like mine?

Just compile Firefox or chromium to WebAssembly and run it inside Edge. :-)

Like your internet service provider you already have??

An ISP is not a single point for all Windows users.

Cloudflare is probably not far off, though not an ISP in quite the same sense

While I agree with the sentiment that ultimately we have to have some level of trust somewhere on the stack, there are a few minor differences.

In theory anyway, I pick my ISP. If this was "support for using a VPN" instead of "we're injecting OUR VPN" I would feel a lot better.

I'm aware Im using my ISP. Even someone who doesn't know much about computers knows their traffic is going somewhere. They might not know the repercussions of that, but if this is just transparently on in the background, effectively a keylogger, a user might never know this is happening.

I give my ISP money. Back to the choice option. Some ISPs are bad and are trying to nickel and dime you to maximize profits. Some ISPs are actually good (I'm not swiss so I don't know for sure, but Init7 looks amazing https://www.init7.net/en/support/faq/privatsphaere/). I don't have to question with my ISP "how are they profiting off of me" because I give them money every month. They might be, but they don't intrinsically NEED to be scraping my data. I am not sure how Microsoft benefits from giving me a free VPN unless they are scraping my data.

I can use a VPN to bypass my ISP monitoring if they do monitor. I have no idea how Microsoft's stuff is set up here. If the end result is that it gets routed through their VPN after my VPN, or instead of my VPN, or even through their stuff at all, but with stamped metadata, then there's not necessarily a great way to get around it other than "don't use Edge"

In general, yes, your ISP isn't your friend. But an ISP is something I asked for, have a use for, and need. A Microsoft stealth VPN is none of those things.

This was also how I could justify being more trusting of Apple. They didn't need all my data because that was paid for up front. The ongoing services that needed to make money I used were also paid for. Obviously that's no long quite true with Apple ramping up their ad business, but that attitude is still often the best you can do without a level of effort that I just am not willing to go through.

From my experience, non-tech people just leave browser defaults. I'd argue this is better than letting them to use public wifi without VPN. If you really care about security you won't use it, of course

Public Wi-Fi in the world of HTTPS is not exactly terrifying.

HTTPS is trivial to break with a man in the middle attack, yes you get a scary warning in your browser about an invalid certificate, but I'd bet that 90% of people will just click through it and ignore it.

I highly doubt this prediction is accurate. Most people will think something is broken and call tech support.

Aside from that, this isn’t possible for HSTS sites.

Really? Most people? I cannot think of anyone from my family who would even think about it for a second - they would just get annoyed they can't get to their bank website or whatever and just click continue. Also what tech support? Me?

But now there is no button "continue", you have to click multiple buttons, which are not clearly labelled, in order to see the page. I'm sure 90% of people would not even be aware that you are able to continue.

Even more, for self-signed certificate on chrome, there is no button to continue for example. Check https://self-signed.badssl.com/

In your example, all I had to do was click advanced then proceed(Chrome on Android)

Ok, on chrome desktop there is no way to bypass the security

Yes, there is. I often have to use it to deal with some internal misconfigured site inside the corporate intranet (the cause is almost always that a certificate has expired, when it isn't it's because a host can be reached with two names and the cert matches only one of them, but that case can be fixed by using the proper URL). I have no trouble telling chrome desktop to bypass.

... and I always read the details before proceeding (finding out what chrome's problem with the cert is).

For some type of errors it is possible, for some other it isn't. Check the badssl website and test the various type of bad certs, you'll see.

HSTS cannot be overridden. Which bank domain names are you thinking of that are not one of the twelve thousand names on the HSTS preload list? https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:net...

I tried 5 banks (swedish and italian). None of them are in the list. I feel safer now :D :D :D

handelsbanken.se danskebank.se unicredit.it fideuram.it sella.it

handelsbanken.se is on line 163144. (I was a little bit off on the length of the list before)

unicredit.it is not on the list, but unicredit.ba and unicredit.ro are. (Lines 7331 and 7332) It does send HSTS headers.

danskebank.se and sella.it are not in the file, nor are the base strings, but both sites do send HSTS headers.

fideuram.it is not on the list, and does not send HSTS headers, so they don't seem particularly interested in security. They also haven't set an A record for the root domain, so visiting `fideuram.it` returns NXDOMAIN. Only `www.fideuram.it` exists.

So this shows that your statement about the security of hsts headers was overblown?

You got me. I wildly overestimated the competence of Eurobanks. I'll never make the mistake of assuming an institution knows what it's doing again.

fideuram removed the phisical tokens for 2fa and moved to SMS, saying that it was because of some european directive… I went to read the directive. It basically said to not use sms and avoid apps in favour of dedicated 2fa devices for banking.

Banks often have awful security systems. Kiwibank in NZ has a "two-factor security" system. All it is is a security questions thing where you click on screen to fill in 3 letters of the hidden answer. The on-screen keyboard makes it secure, you see? Against keyloggers.

I once wrote them a long email about what two-factor is actually supposed to be and why it exists, and got a reply basically saying "lol ok, our security is great ok?"

I've since switched away from them for a bank which does 'two-factor' by sending codes via SMS, but only when its algorithm decides that it needs to. That's not very often.

From my experience working as on-campus tech support in college, most people who aren't tech savvy will quickly give up or look to someone else for help. They will likely not think to click Advanced -> Continue Anyway (unless they have been taught to do that before).

Tech support comes in many forms. The owner of the website, a friend who knows about computers, someone else in the workplace, the vendor they purchased their laptop from.

Hsts solves sslstrip, I do not believe it enforces cert pinning. Iirc browsers deprecated cert pinning some time ago.

I've seen HSTS not let me continue without the server having the expected certificate recently, so I think that's still a thing.

That might be because of certificate transparency rather than certificate pinning.

"Aside from that, this isn't possible for HSTS sites."

Isn't it possible for the user to disable HSTS. A simple web search produces detailed instructions, from a CA.

https://sectigostore.com/blog/how-to-disable-hsts-in-chrome-...

Also, what does "HSTS sites" mean. Does it mean (a) "official" HSTS via HTTP header alone, (b) "unofficial" HSTS via preload list (see RFC 6797 section 12.3), i.e., the list maintained by Google, hardcoded into a browser, or (c) both. The "unofficial" approach only seems feasible for a limited number of domainnames and unworkable for every domainname in existence.

In tests I have done on Chrome (YMMV), executing "Clear site data" via Developer Tools, or including

   Clear-Site-Data: *

in an HTTP response header, e.g., added via a user-deployed proxy, will clear an "official" HSTS block, allowing the "MITM" to proceed.

Besides being generally annoying, HSTS allows for setting "supercookies" that persist even in "Incognito" mode

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/02/02/anatomy-of-a-bro...

The RFC for HSTS even admits how it can be used for web tracking. Not too concerning for the advertising company sponsoring the RFC.

14.9. Creative Manipulation of HSTS Policy Store

Since an HSTS Host may select its own host name and subdomains thereof, and this information is cached in the HSTS Policy store of conforming UAs, it is possible for those who control one or more HSTS Hosts to encode information into domain names they control and cause such UAs to cache this information as a matter of course in the process of noting the HSTS Host. This information can be retrieved by other hosts through cleverly constructed and loaded web resources, causing the UA to send queries to (variations of) the encoded domain names. Such queries can reveal whether the UA had previously visited the original HSTS Host (and subdomains).

I use a loopback-bound forward proxy to enforce zero tolerance for HTTP across all programs, not just the web browser. Everything is sent via HTTPS. The proxy is configured to to check certificates, and deny connections, according to rules I set. I use a text-only browser for noncommercial, recreational web use so I need a forward proxy, if for nothing other than to deal with the spread of TLS. But I also use it for a whole laundry list of tasks.

Maybe it is just me, but HSTS, like much of Google's rhetoric, comes across as unfriendly if not hostile to proxies, regardless of who is running them. Consider this line from the RFC

"The rationale behind this is that if there is a "man in the middle" (MITM) -- whether a legitimately deployed proxy or an illegitimate entity -- it could cause various mischief (see also Appendix A ("Design Decision Notes") item 3, as well as Section 14.6 ("Bootstrap MITM Vulnerability"));"

"Mischief." Does that include inspecting one's own HTTP traffic on one's own network. How about blocking certain methods of tracking, data collection and advertising. Apparently it includes disabling HSTS.

Let's be honest. Google is an undisputed king of "mischief". The stakes for Google mischief are much higher and there have been too many fines to count. Consider the latest. How many people deploying their own proxies get fined $4B. (Arguably, an issue of "control" was at the heart of that decision.)

https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/14/european_court_fines_...

If the proxy is "legitimately deployed" then why not stay out of the network operator's way. Let them have control. Give the option to cede control to Google instead of making it a default.

I use HSTS for commercial, nonrecreational web use, when I have to use a "modern" browser. That is a small fraction of total web use for me.

Thanks for the informative post.

I'd argue the invalid certificate would only get the middle segment of semi-tech literate but security illiterate people. So maybe a lot of people on this site . The average user, based on my observations, tends to take these warnings very seriously.

Have you looked at what the UX is for invalid certificates in 2022? It's not like ten years ago where you just click enough times and "visit anyway".

Here, try this link in Chrome: https://untrusted-root.badssl.com/. When you click Advanced, it tells you "the website sent scrambled credentials that Chrome cannot process". And beyond that there's just no button to bypass it. You can't visit the site. (Sure, there's probably a chrome://flags or --disable-web-security way to bypass this, but that's well beyond the average user's comfort zone, as well it should be.)

I clicked that link - in Chrome on Android all I had to do was click "advanced" then "proceed anyway". I have never changed any flags or default settings in this browser.

I just tried to open the site in Safari, and there's no "Continue anyway" button, only "Go Back". I did not change any default settings, because I use Firefox as my daily driver ( and Firefox does have "Accept risk and continue" button, but I think the word "risk" on it is scary enough for many people to not click it).

EDIT: It turns out there is a "visit this website anyway" option in Safari, but it is not a button, it's a link which you only notice when you click "Show details" button and read the warning.

A slight digression, but I read[1] recently that typing “thisisunsafe” while the tab has focus is sufficient for bypassing the warning.

[1]: https://twitter.com/cyb3rops/status/1561995926666985472?s=20...

Uh I just have to click "advanced" and then "proceed anyway".

I tried on a blank profile to make sure there were no strange settings.

it's not so easy to click through, because I often try and it really seems like they don't want you to, the dialogs are very confusing.

>trivial >requires user mistake

Not sure how that matches.

It's trivial to set it up for the attacker. If you have a Linux laptop you can set up a redirect for all the traffic on the network through your machine with two commands, then there's plenty of tools that will intercept any incoming HTTPS certificate, replace it with your own, the decrypt the traffic. It sounds like a lot but anyone can set this up in about 15 minutes - that's why I said it's trivial.

The user mistake is just clicking "advanced" then "proceed". I know all my family members would do that without questioning.

Maybe teach them to not do that.

Plus, Firefox is soon implementing HTTPS-Only by default if I remember correctly. What was it, maybe 2016 there was a big push for SSL and the majority of the web, even login and payment pages, were HTTP? Now only a small percentage of the web isn't HTTPS. I have HTTPS-Only enabled in Firefox and rarely do I have to click the 'Continue Anyway' button to browse an HTTP page. For most general users that only use popular services, I'm sure it's even more rare.

Its so easy, even a dummy like myself can grab a cert for my self hosted services. I dont give any HTTP only sites any slack

I have a site from 1997, pure html, with drivers, install disks, documentation for computers from the 80s/90s.

It works. It's fine. No, it does not need ssl. What, someone is going to hack a floppy driver for a computer, which doesn't even have a built in network stack?!

No, I am not going to do work on it, any work, at all.

Millions of such sites exist, are fine, are safe.

It is all fun and games until one of the downloads from your site picks up malware in transit and the user goes "why did this web admin infect my computer? Sue!"

This genuinely happens a lot in the 2020s.

Please provide citations for those lawsuits.

I think of you say "genuinely happens a lot" you should give some examples, because this seems odd to me.

More likely sites get cloned, improve their SEO over the original, and distribute malware.

Ok since it happens a lot can you cite it happening in 3 different occasions since 2020?

> This genuinely happens a lot in the 2020s.

Sceptical of that claim, can you provide a few documented cases?

Particularly for low-volume sites like the parent post.

> with drivers, install disks

Depending on what the drivers are for, you may be a prime candidate for MitM. People already go to your site to download software they're going to run in the most privileged mode. This is a perfect candidate for a type of watering hole attack.

Considering you're providing those for 90s machines, you could be the last resort website for a few interesting industry computers with no security restrictions around them.

> Depending on what the drivers are for, you may be a prime candidate for MitM.

Doing that MitM is technically very easy, but in practice pretty hard. You'd have to have an adversary on your network path watching for connections to this particular esoteric low-volume site hosting drivers for machines from the 80s and 90s.

That is extremely unlikely.

I have a much easier way to target that content: Just put up a new site hosting the same content with malware attached. No need for MitM shenanigans.

Security isn't about absolutes, it is about risk managment and being aware of the likelihood and consequence of the risks is important.

You could host hashes of the downloads on an https page. Should be quite simple. Malware can still work on a computer without a built-in network stack and if users are getting downloads onto that computer, then data can leave through the same means.

The site contents don't necessarily matter.

You're at a coffee shop or library using their WiFi. Your computer sends a plaintext HTTP message. The attacker just needs to be able to see that message and get a response back to you before the real site does, and the real site is a lot further away than the guy sitting at the table next to you (or the hacked router, if he doesn't want to be there in person). Then they can feed your browser whatever they want.

A login form to phish you, perhaps?

They can even start replying, then go off and fetch from the actual site before finishing the response, if it helps to incorporate the real data.

Set up a gopher mirror too :)

Putting stunnel Infront of that site and opening 443 is about a solid 30 minutes of effort

And set up certbot/whatever..

And update all links to not go back to the HTTP site...

And troubleshoot weird issues (TLS errors are generally not helpful)...

And maintain that setup for years...

Not an insurmountable effort for sure, but if you estimate 30 min for the total additional effort of adding HTTPS to a site then I have a bridge to sell you.

That is fine. The site itself is safe. Accessing it over untrusted transits is not. What has changed since 97? Well, attacks became far more sophisticated, and the transits that people access stuff over became far less trustworthy.

There is nothing wrong with your website. However, you shouldn't be surprised when modern browsers stop working with it. Progress doesn't come free.

Not caring about whether some segment (possibly even a majority) of users can or are willing to jump through hoops to access your site is a valid choice, just like publishing through gopher is. You do you.

http://n-gate.com/software/2017/

I always chuckle at this site does not need SSL post from n-gate.

PS: Use the URL directly in browser because the site doesn't like traffic from HN.

> PS: Use the URL directly in browser because the site doesn't like traffic from HN.

Or just fix your browser settings to not send cross-domain Referer headers.

> Millions of such sites exist, are fine, are safe.

Frankly, even sadly, they are also entirely forgettable and don’t add enough value to hold back the modern web.

> No, I am not going to do work on it, any work, at all.

Without HTTPS, the content can be replaced entirely. Last time it was JavaScript that DDOS'd github. If you don't want to serve content over HTTPS, then you don't care what your users receive. Just delete the site and they all get 404's instead, since you already admit that you don't care either way.

If it makes you feel any better, HTTP without HTTPS was a mistake we all made together. It should never have happened.

Seems ,like since inception internet protocols was designed with foreseeable security implications, Gnunet is project is attempting to solve this

> If it makes you feel any better, HTTP without HTTPS was a mistake we all made together. It should never have happened.

Given that http predates SSL 1.0 by a few years, somewhat inevitable.

Given that HTTP without TLS can provide backwards compatibility while anyone and their dog is advocating for deprecating TLS versions and them being too complex for most people to maintain on their own, I respectfully disagree that plain HTTP was a mistake.

You are hosting executable data of some kind on a non-authenticated protocol. That's totally not dangerous at all. A MITM definitely couldn't cause any damage by altering executable data in transit on unsuspecting users. This has never happened to anyone.

>are safe

No, they are not.

>No, I am not going to do work on it, any work, at all.

If you are too lazy to do it securely maybe you just shouldn't do it at all.

HTTPS everywhere by default can't come fast enough. There is no excuse at all to not have HTTPS support today and browsers should deny access to these lazy and careless sites by default. Anyone who can't spend the 5m to set it up for their website can go kick rocks as far as I'm concerned.

No one is forcing you to use TLS. Do whatever the fuck you want, it's your site?

I keep my site HTTP for compatibility and accessibility.

HTTPS can introduce all scenarios for not being able to connect.

I'm not hosting any secret data, but I do want to be able to post from anywhere.

Recently I noticed that FF doesn't even let you accept invalid (meaning no longer recognized as valid by FF because they changed the rules to requrie SAN) certificates for HSTS-enabled sites. The bug report's response was that the HSTS standard specifies that. Fuck that, the users should always be the one in control of such decisions in the end.

You forget exactly how much the government felt they got out of just knowing whom was talking to whom, not even bothering to collect the data of the conversation itself.

Now they only have to subpoena/hack/partner with microsoft for that

Microsoft was one of the first companies to sign up for PRISM [1], doing so in 2007. I think there's a subconscious feel among many that because the media stopped reporting on these things, that it stopped happening. PRISM never ended, and almost certainly has only expanded and grown even more invasive and brazen largely owing society's apathy towards what Snowden revealed.

Literally to this day one can read things like the NSA manual for using their software that enables real-time absolute surveillance of Skype: "User's Guide For PRISM Skype Collection." [2] The idea of any degree of privacy from any tech company hosted in America is a lie. The main difference with China is that we lie about our surveillance state, and force companies to lie about it, while China openly advertises theirs.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

[2] - https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/Guid...

Public wifi and bluetooth detectors all over is whats scary, as most public wifi is used by phones, not machines and who the hell is running edge on their phone?

but this just reminded me of the failed FB phone and the failed microsoft phone...

What bluetooth devices are you concerned are going to leak private data?

Looking at the ones I use daily... headphones, TV soundbar, Xbox controllers, TV remote. None of those provide an interesting attack vector.

My iPhone isn't really going to be connecting to random stuff and leaking data, so I don't really see the risk here. Maybe I'm missing something?

>>My iPhone isn't really going to be connecting to random stuff and leaking data

Incorrect -- BT scanners and loggers have been LONG tracking your things avail...

and the fact that Apple doesnt allow you to "turn off" it merely pauses..

both wifi and BT...

they use prox sensors for BT for airtags, wifi etc and ALL OF THAT data in mined like mad.

Any Apple person that says otherwise is lying to you.

So deanonymizing bluetooth device IDs. I know the Canadian spies used airport Wifis to deanonymize Wifi MAC addresses then set up wifi stations all over Toronto to experiment in tracking people.

How would they do the same for bluetooth? Broadcasting "Dans iPhone" doesn't tell you much.

Correct, but its a more insidious web on this level...

they have so many correlation engines for device location, that it will soon be impossible to be "off grid", if its not already.

how the heck do you think there are fn leaks from over a decade ago of "text messages received by the government reveal that person X who is on the shit-list was quoted as saying [BULLSHIT] sources close to CNN have stated.."]

ASIDE: Famous story from ~20 years ago was talking about the CIA handlers at CNN... and the revolving door of in-q-tel emps from fb moving back and forth within the security team (one of which had to be walked out of the building for [things])

you dont need "dan's phone" they have had eschelon for DECADES and were able to literally do 6-degrees ppl tracking since the 1990s...

WTH do you think they named it "starlink" instead of sky-net...

And when they built the first part, they were advertising the wonderful things the rural folks in africa's greater continent will benefit, then after a few years they showed that the system will primarily service the dense populations of the coasts of places like the USA and AUS -- which is where a big portion of the five-eyes service.

IMEI and such is a bitch..

iOS is the biggest location tracking platform ever...

Remember when the founder of Android (from Danger) was let go from google with a ~200MM$ golden parachute at $90MM to gtfo?

yeah but im pretty sure 99% of the population just clicks past those SSL certificate warnings, in part because they don't understand what that means, and in part because there are way too many sites that let their certificates expire.

> Public Wi-Fi in the world of HTTPS

Story time. Someone I know once got laid thanks to Facebook not encrypting their sessions

My university was still using basic ass unencrypted WiFi with some kind of terrible dns-hijack sign in to “auth”. This of course meant that everyone put their shiny MacBooks on essentially public wifi and logged in to social media in the clear in class.

Some enterprising chaps made a browser extension that made it trivial to snoop any open sessions and impersonate that session in a new tab.

Someone I know would do this during lecture and post to people’s social media as them saying they should pay attention in lecture. Possibly some other scandalous things were said. The hilarity that led from that stranger doing so led to the beautiful nerdy girl sitting behind this person noticing and daring them to post more. That became hanging out, parties, and as far as I know they got married and have kids now.

Literal people exist that wouldn’t otherwise because Facebook didn’t have HTTPS

Fuck, HTTPS was already popular by the time I went to college. That explains everything.

To be fair this needed HTTP and WPA(?) lol. Old school wifi let you see everything every other client sent.

I credit the fact that basically nothing was encrypted over the wire when i got into computers in the 90s for learning how protocols work.

>Some enterprising chaps made a browser extension that made it trivial to snoop any open sessions and impersonate that session in a new tab.

Firesheep was super big for a while, yeah. I used it to show a few coffee shops that yes, really, WiFi with a password of "password" was measurably better for their customers than no password: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep

Is your friend Samy Kamkar?

You can learn a lot about a person based on the IPs they visit. HTTPS/SSL doesn't protect you from that.

In many cases you can even determine which protocols and general content they are consuming from that IP based on traffic shaping/fingerprinting. The burst of traffic your browser sends when loading a particular site is quite exploitable. There's plenty of software already available that makes use of this.

What percentage do you think of all network traffic that Edge handles is 1) Over wifi? 2) Over unencrypted wifi?

From my experience, tech people with non-default browsers can't use the internet :(

We had recently hired new programmers, 2 freshgrad and 1 junior. All of them use edge on their personal laptop and I didn't notice extension button anywhere.

why is it ok if firefox and opera do this but no one else?

It's also a way to front run ISPs in the data market. Then these vendors can sell the data on the data broker market and pocket the cash the ISPs are getting by selling whatever browsing history data they can infer (from DNS and traffic).

I suspect this is the corporate motivation. The increased state surveillance and control is a side effect.

Corporations have shown worse proclivities than the US government these days.

what makes you think its the US government you should worry about?

EDIT: clarified "US" government, though I don't necessarily intend to suggest other governments are the worry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...

they already have this at several points in your network. from ISP to target site. meh.

the reason microsoft is doing that is because google is forcing their hand with Floc implemented in the browser.

you wont be in ads next year unless you can slurp more traffic than the NSA. and only google can do that today, thanks to chrome + android. apple is a close second.

How is FLOC relevant to this?

How do you think google competitors will have access to all those user to form the cohorts without having the browser or google analytics code everywhere?

They already have that with ISPs, right? I don't see this as worse. If anything ISPs are more scummy.

I think there's more to it than that. Good for some and bad for others. A few rough off the top of my head:

Good:

* Better privacy from the intrusive ad motivated JS shit hole the internet has become.

* Faster internet for those on slow connections

* Protection from ISP MITM. Many countries now have mandatory data collection laws that ISPs have to follow.

* Better than a lot of shady 3rd party commercial VPN providers.

* Is opt-in (for now)

* Potential to reduce Google's dominance

Bad:

* Obvious MITM choke point, as you mentioned

* Potential control / monitoring by two large corporations

* Business goals usually override users.

>* Is opt-in (for now)

Are you sure?

>a VPN baked into Edge appears to be turned on by default, but only for certain use cases.

Wait til you hear about Cloudflare

CF removed kiwi farms from their services. If they're cooperating with FBI they would continue to host and intercept traffic to decloak users.

Honeypots outlive their usefulness. Take silkroad v2 that was actually ran by the FBI, yet they still shut it down.

Yup, a VPN is not a security measure at all unless you trust the VPN provider more than the site you're connecting to...

Actually, with a VPN, you need to trust the VPN provider AND the site you're connecting to...

well you might have a reason to trust a VPN provider you pay for, but who is the customer for MS Edge.

The insane thing is that, because the VPN has a 1GB/month traffic limit, there is no way to enforce it unless they associate all traffic with a Microsoft controlled user identity. Cloudflare literally has to keep track of any sites you visit and associate them to your ID to make it work.

Though, I do believe that for connections from public WiFi it's somewhat of an improvement. It establishes a minimal security baseline of: "ok, we'll sell your data and let FBI snoop on you, but we won't inject trojans in your downloads and then hijack your webcam to create ransom-porn (though the FBI/??? might)".

And not even then. Most VPN providers in the top 10 are actually very shady and their organizational structure is quite opaque.. to say the least. I wouldn't be surprised if at least half of the top providers are actually FBI fronts, like the ANOM chat app.

It is so weird that they're 'VPN providers'. They're proxies. It's not really a VPN unless I'm in control, or they're providing servers in the VPN to connect to.

My ISP reserves the right to sell data on the sites I visit. If the VPN provider promises not to do that, it’s probably a win.

ISPs in Poland at least give you the ability to pay so they do not spy on you. It is very small (10%)but I have no doubt most people cheap out. Internet is relatively cheap here.

This reminds me of this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EncroChat

However, there analogy is not 100% on point.

> This is absolute BS they're implementing this.

Out of the perspective of a PRISM Premium Partner this makes perfect sense.

While it doesn’t resolve all the issues, the single point to monitor is your internet connection where they have jurisdiction, not some arbitrary VPN provider. Then if they can force the IKE a certain way they decrypt.

I think the other side of this is if you have FBI attention, do you really want to look more suspicious? Whatever fight you try with them you will not win.

Yep, a VPN baked into a browser like this is literally Microsoft stealing the network routes from your ISP, who is probably too embarrassed to complain that what’s happening is they are taking that sweet, sweet data with them. It’s like high-fructose corn syrup for targeted advertising imho. Who’s selling?

VPNs don’t help privacy at all. They allow you to substitute trust in your ISP for trust in a different entity. For some, that may be good, but for most others it’s a wash.

I'd say they're still a net win, generally. The ISP vs VPN service tracking who does cancel out (if you ignore privacy claims of VPN providers, vs ISPs generally not guaranteeing that at all), but for every other service I might consume, when I'm on VPN I'm no longer connecting from a unique IP that can have other identifying information tagged to it.

To add to that: in Sweden (which is generally pretty ok in regards to privacy and rights) ISPs are required to store traffic for 6 months, while VPN providers are not.

Wasn't this struck down by the EU recently?

They help in public WiFi.

So I can pay $10/mo for a VPN for use when I'm on public wifi, or I can run WireGuard on my Raspberry Pi at home and get one for free

It might be cheaper but still not free. Cost of electricity + time to maintain + Raspberry Pi itself. Not to mention that you don't get the variety of servers (for geo-location or more diverse networks not tracked to you by websites themselves).

Well the Raspberry Pi is already on 24/7 running a few other services for my home network. But even then, the energy consumption per month costs pennies. I update the device once a quarter and it takes me 5 minutes. These costs are so negligible as to have no impact on my decision making process.

Unless you are a network security expert, aren't you greatly increasing your risk by running that WireGuard server?

WireGuard is pretty minimalist and has great defaults, AFAIK if you manage to set it up you're good.

Unless your credentials leak, of course, but a security expert would have that same risk.

Why would you? Nobody can connect to it without your private key. Or is there something I am not aware of? Genuine question, as I am running wireguard in a few places and thought it was secure by default.

You do not need to be a "network security expert" to safely run a WireGuard server

Not sure what services you’ve looked at, but it definitely doesn’t cost $10/month.

Your personal solution seems pretty good though.

Modern TLS is enough to prevent others from eavesdropping everything except domain names when on public WiFi. Domain names are sent in clear text if your client supports SNI.

A trail of DNS names is more than enough to know what somebody is up to.

You could use DoH, which you should do anyway. No reason to leak DNS lookups to anyone.

DoH alone is not enough due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication being sent in plain text. Some day ECH (formerly, eSNI) should help with that.

I thought TLSv1.3 already encrypted the SNI?

It does

ESNI is not implemented yet on any website. And there is no software support except beta versions of Chrome/Edge and you have to manually toggle flags in dev mode.

All SNIs are passed as plain text to your ISP/VPN, even with DoH/TLS secure DNS enabled.

No. ESNI is an later-created extension to TLS 1.3

you'll always be leaking it to whoever you are sending your query to.

Public wifi, assuming you don't send any personal info to "sign in" to the public wifi is more anonymous than a vpn that has your name/address/etc.

> VPNs don’t help privacy at all

Or course they do, I'm so tired of seeing posts like this when really what you mean is that it's not perfect privacy and therefore you don't like it.

No as a rule.

They just replace your ISP with a VPN company. Which is the two is more shady is something you have to figure out, keeping in mind that a subsection of the internet just stops working or turns the aggressiveness of their anti-bot protections up to the maximum on a VPN.

> Or course they do

Let me compare an ISP spying vs a VPN spying:

1. You make DNS request about example.com. Your ISP sees this. Your ISP can see what websites you "might" visit.

2. You connect to 1.2.3.4. Your ISP sees this. Your ISP can see what websites you "did" visit.

3. You request some data and receive some data. Your ISP sees the size of the data. If it's not encrypted, it can also see the content. Your ISP can see (at least) the size of objects that you requested -- which is enough to fingerprint many specific contents.

Okay so not using a VPN gives effectively zero privacy. Let's look at a VPN:

1. You connect to a VPN (and let's assume your connection doesn't "leak" insomuch as now _all_ network traffic goes through the VPN). Your ISP can see this.

2. You make DNS request about example.com. Your VPN sees this and your ISP can see a network packet. Your VPN can see what websites you "might" visit, your ISP can't.

2. You connect to 1.2.3.4. Your VPN sees this. Your VPN can see what websites you "did" visit. Your ISP still sees traffic to the VPN.

3. You request some data and receive some data. Your VPN sees the size of the data, and your ISP only sees the aggregate-size of data across all of your sessions. If it's not encrypted, your VPN can also see the content but your ISP should still only see aggregate size. Your VPN can see (at least) the size of objects that you requested -- which is enough to fingerprint many specific contents. Your ISP will have a tough time fingerprinting content from specific websites.

4. Your ISP can note that you have a high amount of traffic, possibly note that the traffic is going to a known VPN destination, and that your "normal" traffic is now gone.

Now, your VPN can see all the stuff that your ISP used to see. In addition, your ISP can now determine that you might be doing something illegal, suspicious, or at the very least "enterprise grade" and demand more money.

Have you really gained more privacy?

You increased the number of choices you can make regarding your privacy.

Your isp is legally resident in the country most likely to want to spy on you. There are also very few isps per country, so it's less work for the attacker to cover everyone they care about.

There are vast numbers of vpns, so total coverage is impossible. They are also very likely to be in a different legal jurisdiction so it's non trivial to do.

So, yes, you have, by making yourself a harder target despite having the same amount of centralisation on your part

Same with most VPN providers. Just expands the search from "ask ISP" to "ask ISP, they tell government its a VPN company, ask VPN company".

Now, sure, they could "just" delete logs, but their government can "just" tell them not to, or even tell them to live send the logs to them directly.

So it's really "which country's government you trust".

Adding that in general a country's law (data protection/privacy in this context) usually targets its own citizens; traffic related to foreign citizens (as in the case of VPNs) would for sure have a lower degree of protection.

There's quite a few VPNs who have been asked to keep logs by the authorities but the VPN providers contest it in court, and since their jurisdiction laws don't need them to, the courts side with the VPN providers.

Mullad, OVPN are a couple.

What are your opinions on those? Not every country has laws like USA/India, which give the government free reign by citing certain Acts.

my country has between 3 and 20 isp's per city. of a country of 7 million.

I assume they are just resellers, buying bulk data from a big carrier. Is that the case?

IDK about simplyinfinity, but here in NZ, the last mile of internet infrastructure (the fibre from homes to the exchange) is owned by regulated companies which must lease access to them at set rates or lower, and mustn't act as ISPs.

As such, we have dozens of ISPs with their own backend infrastructure, all sharing the same last-mile, and most available nation-wide.

That said, they're all going to be buying transit from a big backbone ISP to get overseas connectivity.

As others have mentioned you gained privacy from your government that has easy access to whatever information your ISP has but not towards a VPN provider.

But the information you leak towards your ISP or VPN isn't the only variable. With a VPN you leak less information to the services you interact with (e.g. your IP is hidden) which undoubtedly increases privacy.

Based on that analysis, I say clearly yes! Privacy is about choosing who to share with, be it a specific group or no-one. Being able to share with a VPN of my choice (who, if reputable, shouldn't further disseminate my information) is likely a privacy gain compared to being forced to share with my ISP (many of whom would gladly sell my data).

Being able to choose to reveal data to Mullvad over Comcast or Verizon seems like a clear win to me.

Yea i really don't get these people. Frustratingly. Perfect is the enemy of good here. Yes, full privacy is the goal, but i know certain actors are spying on me. If i can bypass them, i can at least attempt to improve it.

At the very least i rob Comcast of my data. Which is my goal, after all. Not full privacy.

> Yes, full privacy is the goal, but i know certain actors are spying on me. If i can bypass them, i can at least attempt to improve it.

The problem is that it doesn’t actually change anything while giving a false sense of security.

Your VPN’s ‘improved’ privacy is just as worthless as the privacy you get with just your ISP. If something requires privacy, neither can be used, and if it doesn’t then why should it matter which one you use ?

Privacy is an on/off thing. Either you have it or you don’t. There is no in-between.

This is quite a concrete illustration of the concept of the perfect being the enemy of the good. Thank you.

No... It's a demonstration of adherence the axiom "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good" being misapplied.

The "Good" (VPN) is exactly as imperfect as it's complete abscence. There has been no improvement whatsoever. Literally, as far as Privacy is concerned, nothing short of "No one actor has the capability to sit on a full stream of traffic", will suffice.

Either you're MITM'd or you aren't. Use malicious postmen if it makes it easier.

If you have the same guy come, and all of your mail goes through him, he can reconstruct all conversational state.

Now imagine you get a different malicious postman at random every day. He eacesdrops on every packet, but he's not privy to which of his fellows is scheduled to get the next packet. Therefore, it's not practicable to MITM in any practical way. This all goes out the window when someone controls the malicious postman scheduler, of course, because then they can figure out a map of who to go to to reconstruct your conversation.

The above is the concept behind Tor, and why the only effective counter to it is to run a hell of a lot of entry/exit nodes so you can conceivably time correlate given enough consecutive probe points are hit.

Russia has the ability to drop a nuke in the region you currently live in, so there's no such thing as safety and therefore why do you have locks on your doors?

i find this extremely doubtful. I see the point of your statement, but i'm willing to bet 99% of all the already built nuclear devices wouldn't work today. There's no way that they're all stored in such a way that the delicate mechanisms are protected from the environment and oxidization, moisture ingress, insects, heat and cold expansion and contraction.

That a nation could make a new device is arguable, that a nation could make a device that could be delivered without flying planes over another country is less arguable. Even nukes as they stand would only pose significant threats to certain parts of a country (there was a map floating around the web a few days back of areas of the US most susceptible to the - pardon the pun - fallout from a tactical strike.)

Especially when you consider that what they're really saying is that a VPN won't hide you from a state level actor.

Yeah, of course not, that's not nearly the only reason to use a VPN.

One wonders if you consider your bedroom to be private despite the fact that a peeping tom can still look through the window.

My VPN provider (Mullvad) doesn't have my full name, address, and social security number. They could build a profile off my account number, sure, so I have to trust that they're not. If they actually aren't, fantastic, I win. If they actually are, I still win, because they have less data to build a profile on me from. I know for certain that my ISP is selling my data, so I'm certainly no worse off.

On top of that, I get the benefit of not being tracked everywhere on the web. Or if they are tracking me, they have bogus data. And I can set my exit server to a jurisdiction with more user-friendly privacy laws.

Mullvad is just the first link in the chain of untrusted systems between you and whatever server you’re connecting to.

Also, what better place to tap traffic than the connection of a VPN provider.

> Also, what better place to tap traffic than the connection of a VPN provider.

Well, per my previous post, my ISP is definitely a better place. Hell, you don't even need to tap them. They'll just sell you the data, along with other PII. (Setting aside Mullvad' multi-hop support, which would require taps in multiple jurisdictions).

I think the point you're trying to make is that this isn't resilient to the NSA monitoring my traffic. I had hoped it was clear from my message that there's another level of privacy I'm concerned with related to intrusive private entities. I'm not expecting the GDPR or similar privacy laws to stop the NSA either, but they serve a useful purpose.

I guess I'm banking on Meta and Google not tapping Mullvad. Or even the RIAA or MPAA, for that matter. Because my ISP will very willingly give those entities data. And as long as unencrypted SNI is the norm, my ISP knows more than I want it to know about my browsing behavior. Not to mention the stuff that isn't HTTPS. Sure, Verizon knows I've established a connection an encrypted tunnel and how much bandwidth I routed through it, but that's a level of metadata I'm not concerned with.

So, yeah, Mullvad could be logging every packet through their tunnel. They could even assemble a profile based on my account and sell it to all the data brokers and advertising networks. They still don't have my SSN. Even if all of that happened, then I'm still no worse a situation than if I didn't use them because my ISP is doing those things. At worst, I'll be out 5€ for the month.

If you don’t trust your ISP, then why not simply switch to another one ? I literally have dozens of ISP’s to choose from at my address. Last time I checked there were 13 ISP’s offering fiber service alone, if you’re willing to settle for DSL or cable there a lot more options. And that is with me living in ‘socialist’ Europe. I can only dream of how many options people in ‘free market’ USA must have.

> And that is with me living in ‘socialist’ Europe. I can only dream of how many options people in ‘free market’ USA must have.

I can feel the sarcasm dripping from this sentence.

I have two viable options, ignoring 5G and satellite services. The one I'm on is the lesser of two evils. And I've largely neutralized the primary concern I have with the ISP I'm on.

Where would you like to move the goal posts now?

> I can only dream of how many options people in ‘free market’ USA must have.

I think you answered your own question.

VPN and ISP are similar in term of middlemen, but there is an important difference downstream of said middlemen.

With your ISP, you appear on the internet as a residential IP that provides your approximate location and most likely doesn't change very often. The requests you make can be easily correlated by PRISM or any other middleman, or by any CDN running the websites you visit.

With a VPN, your exit IP is unrelated to your geographic location, changes very often, and hopefully it is shared among many more users.

GeoIP services are trash. My current IP on most GeoIP services gives a location >900 miles away. My last IP had a location in another country. I don't think I've ever had a GeoIP lookup resolve within 100 miles for any IP I've had.

> GeoIP services are trash.

GeoIP is only necessary when seeing a new IP. But once the IP starts to build a reputation, then the specific location can be determined. It's especially true if you buy something online.

My single data point observation is that it gets my city correct nearly 100% of the time and sometimes is able to resolve to a nearby suburb.

My several datapoints is wildly inconsistent and has never been within several hundred miles.

My office: suburb of Chicago My home: downtown Atlanta My friend's house: just outside Phoenix The McDonald's free WiFi: Chicago A church's WiFi: Some random location in Arkansas.

I'm in North Texas.

Just a few examples I've remembered since making a point to test while I'm out.

Also you could use double VPN config from different VPN providers in separate geo locations with openDNS thrown in one of them. then it would be much harder to correlate your traffic out of the mix. its not about perfect secrecy its about becoming hard enough target.

> Now, your VPN can see all the stuff that your ISP used to see.

> Have you really gained more privacy?

Absolutely, 100%, unambiguously, yes; my ISP openly says that they monetize my data, my VPN says they don't. I'm very happy to gamble that the VPN is telling the truth when faced with the expectation that the ISP is telling the truth.

My VPN was unable to give the British government any logs or IPs relating to someone who emailed a series of bomb threats using them.

As terrible as that is, yeah I feel pretty safe pirating movies using it.

But you're right that blindly trusting a VPN without doing any research might be worse than blindly trusting your ISP.

VPNs entire business revolves around not giving up your data, that's why you pay them. ISP business revolves around protecting their monopoly which means making the government happy. Massively different incentives which means they will act differently. If VPN leaks data and people find out they're done. If ISP does nothing changes for them.

> your ISP can now determine that you might be doing something illegal, suspicious

and my neighbours can determine I might be doing something illegal when I close my curtains, sure.

> Have you really gained more privacy?

No, but you have lost less privacy.

The amount of loss of privacy you incur when some particular item of personal information about you is revealed to another party often depends on how much other information that party has about you.

If the ISP is legally protected from any inquiry or transparency into what they do with the data and is systematically incompetent about protecting it and the vpn exists in a country with good privacy laws, then yeah.

Of course they do? They are a tool that routes traffic through a third party. That can be anywhere from terrible to fantastic for privacy, with everything in between. There's nothing "of course" about it.

One of the main use cases today for VPNs is to pirate movies or access geo-blocked content. That and dodgy hotel wifi.

The adversary is netflix or a IP rights enforcement company, and the user doesn't care what their ISP or a state could observe.

For what they are used for, they are fine. If you are worried about state or megacorp spying, the solution is less technical and more political.

VPNs don't anonymize, they just route you through an anonymizing service. Lol.

ISPs generally don't claim to protect your privacy at all [0]. So it would be foolish to trust them to do something they never claimed they would do. VPNs generally do claim they will protect your privacy so at least trusting them makes some amount of sense.

Going from "trusting" an entity that explicitly requires you to consent to spying when you sign up to trusting one which explicitly promises to protect your privacy when you sign up does seem like it would "help privacy" in most cases.

[0] https://www.privacypolicies.com/blog/isp-tracking-you/

A major difference between your ISP and a VPN is that your ISP is generally an established company based in the same jurisdiction as you are. So, if they do something terrible, in theory at least, they can be brought to court. A non-trivial number of VPNs that claim to protect your privacy, however, are based all around the world with unclear corporate structures. If they do something terrible, you likely have no recourse at all. How much faith you want to put in a promise made by such a company is up to you - but I would push back on the idea that simply making a promise really provides much value by itself.

> based in the same jurisdiction as you are

Why would I trust an entity that often has the legal backing to harvest my data and provide it to the government whenever they "deem" it necessary? The same government that has direct means of control over me? Whether it's the US, China, Germany, I think I'd rather put my chances with some private company that at least has financial and maybe ethical motivations (depending on the company) to protect my privacy. An ISP will only go as far as the law requires to protect it and who knows what backdoor deals are made with governments to subvert those same laws.

There is no realistic/helpful/useful legal process to sue over a breach of privacy. So my ISP being in my jurisdiction doesn't do me any good at all.

ISPs don't emphasize privacy in their marketing, but some large ISPs claim they protect it [0], although their claims are pretty dubious[0][1].

I think your logic holds up, but it's not quite as definitive as you say. VPNs are not the straightforward privacy upgrade that HTTPS is. (I don't think you were trying to imply otherwise.)

I think the picture improves if you choose more carefully. Choosing an established VPN that has a no-log policy and has been audited seems much better, because now multiple companies are putting their reputation on the line. On the other hand, I think a relatively unknown company that's reselling someone else's VPN and hoping to cash in on the "VPN = privacy" is only a slight upgrade over a major ISP.

[0]: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-11-12/column-int... [1]: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/look-what...

VPNs help against geolocation and geofencing though.

I would reverse that assertion under the one condition that you don't use a VPN provider from your own country. In Australia at least, ISPs are legally required to maintain logs of everything you access for several years. By choosing to trust a VPN provider outside of Australia, you defacto have better privacy than you otherwise would have.

Does the VPN company have a business presence in Australia? If so, then maybe you haven't gained as much as you think...

Absolutely true. The VPN provider's servers and business must be outside of your country.

>VPNs don’t help privacy at all.

1. They keep your data safe from your ISP. 2. They keep your IP hidden to the sites you browse.

Those two clearly "help" privacy.

They also expose your data to the VPN operator. That's a negative on privacy. Whether it's a net negative or positive depends on the VPN operator and ISP involved.

The VPN provider could be you hosted somewhere using bitcoin.

While traveling I've used my own VPN hosted at home to provide additional security.

It allows me to trust only my ISP instead of every ISP in various coffee shops.

It is not just about your ISP though. Your IP is getting sent to whatever website you are connecting to. People won't always trust that website.

> VPNs don’t help privacy at all.

> For some, that may be good, but for most others it’s a wash.

That sounds less like "VPNs don’t help privacy at all" and more like "VPNs are helpful some of the time".

In Germany (according to TTDSG) an ISP does not have to claim that. They need explicit permission to track you. It is pretty much as the post does not have to claim that they open your envelopes.

https://www.ivpn.net/ see "Do you really need a VPN?" - not affiliated with them, but tell me any other VPN-service that is actually this upfront... most are marketing the hell out of their apparent magic effects...

since we're on the topic: how is it still a thing that vpn services are actively pitching content-block/copyright circumvention? Seems weird to pitch something as shady this loud and publicly? Reminds me of how weird I find it that trackers and illegal hosting sites have twitter accounts...

I believe it is harder for my government to get my data from a foreign VPN service than from my local oligopoly ISP that is already effectively an arm of the government.

I think the only good reasons to use VPNs are for torrenting and accessing movies only available in other countries. For any privacy reasons its best to use Tor.

Anything that decides to wrap around your internet traffic without telling you should definitely raise your antennas.

Even if they had the best intentions, it's pretty easy to botch these things which erode your privacy even more.

If it was good for you, Microsoft would the the one announcing it. Loudly and repeatedly. They would do it even if it was harmful, but there existed some artificial narrative where it sounds good.

You are hearing it from a third party exactly because they couldn't construct any explanation minimally realistic that sounded good.

They haven't announced it yet because it hasn't been released. Reading the article, it does sound pretty decent.

Partnership with cloudflare, selectively enables when you are connected to untrusted networks like public wifi.

Pretty much the only downside is that they turn it on by default... which is always tricky when most of your target audience is not computer savvy in the least.

How to give people security features that they have to figure out themselves when they can barely open the browser .. a dilemma for the ages.

The pain/anger you’re feeling is called stallmanogenesis: the suffering induced by realizing, by force or otherwise, that stallman was right

Nostradamus of technology, even if we all didn’t want to believe him.

MS motivation is quite clear.

Windows is an appliance (an interface) for amazon shopping and watching netflix.

The MS telemetry has proven that 99.999% of consumers do not tweak default settings or dig under the hood.

The 1-2 million now former "windows power users" are just too small population to be economically feasible to deal with.

For MS it does not matter to lose those few to other tweakable OSs.

Instead MS's product department is dreaming of scooping the remaining billions of cash-laden consumers. Presumably this is what the telemetry tells them.

Cash is good, consuming is good, keeps the economy running, making shareholders happy.

Ok, but how exactly is your story an explanation of the motivation for VPN in their browser?

When trying to ascertain the intents of large organizations, I find it useful to examine previous actions. In the case of Microsoft, their willingness/intent to add ads and telemetry (including keylogging) into their OS seem to indicate they are doing this for serving ads better to their larger (paying) customers.

If you're not paying for the (specific) service, you are the product.

I mean, if you have an attitude that anything an organization does must be for an ulterior motive, you're always going to get what you are looking for. Heck, people too for that matter. Maybe my dog just pretends to love me to get food.

But in this case, Microsoft is looking for any competitive advantage against Google. They won't win on targeting, and they still make more money selling software than ads. So this does seem like an easy win for them.

> if you have an attitude that anything an organization does must be for an ulterior motive …

Well in the case where they are spending a lot of money to implement and operate a feature that nobody asked for and which has obvious privacy downsides, it does seem worthwhile to examine their motives. It’s not like we’re responding to the announcement for the next model of the Microsoft ergonomic keyboard with “hmmm, what are they up to?”

> obvious privacy downsides

What is the obvious privacy downside of selectively enabling a Cloudflare VPN when browsing on public Wifi or unsecured sites (which is when it enables)? That Cloudflare can see what sites you visit?

On public Wifi and unsecured sites, anyone could potentially see and modify the data anyway.

The privacy issue is obvious. If my browser is funneling all of its traffic through a specific VPN instead of letting my system handle it, I have to wonder whether that choice was based on the VPN operator wanting to see my data or cooperating with someone who does.

This is like finding out Microsoft decided all internet traffic on windows should be proxied through their servers. Could there be a benefit? Yes. Does it raise serious questions? Most definitely.

> If my browser is funneling all of its traffic through a specific VPN instead of letting my system handle it

It's not. According to the article, it only funnels insecure traffic through the Cloudflare VPN (eg, to a site with an invalid certificate). And this doesn't prevent you from using your own VPN as well.

If you're connecting to a site over HTTP, and the packet takes 10 hops to get there, that's 10 machines that can see who you're connecting to and what data you're sending. Including, in all likelihood, a major CDN like Cloudflare. Also including anyone on the same public Wifi network. This data was never kept private to begin with.

If you're connecting over HTTPS with a valid certificate, the VPN isn't used. Even if it were though, they couldn't see your data. It's encrypted.

Because every recent development in the evolution of Windows has been hostile to privacy.

Check out the book “Hard Drive” about the early days of Microsoft, and you will never be able to see anything that corporate does without suspicion, and for a good reason.

And apparently we now get downvoted on Hacker News for a book recommendation. Amazing.

About the pihole problem, redirect all calls to port 53 to your pihole.

If Edge is using DoH, you're out of luck.

Does something like `source 0.0.0.0 dest 8.8.8.8 dport 443 action drop` work for DoH?

You are actually being too kind IMHO.

Probably because Facebook already tried the free VPN and it was every bit the privacy nightmare you'd expect it to be. Given Microsoft's track record, there's no reason to expect that to be any different.

I am 100% with you in general, but this feels more like the Windows Defender launch than some fully cynical power grab. That is to say - Microsoft gets a lot of grief and work from windows installs getting taken over / viruses / etc. For users who don't pick up their own protection (and don't choose to turn off the default windows protection) this feels like a better default. I don't trust Microsoft, but you are already exposed to their manipulations when you are using their OS - and this will help protect you from other manipulations.

This is where Apple's implementation, where the info is split between them and a third party with neither of them able to read the traffic on their own is so smart. Especially since there are multiple counter-parties to Apple. It also negates the risk of an MITM attack. Yes of course they could collaborate with a counter-party to break the system, but it seems significantly less likely to happen, and if it was happening it would be significantly more likely to come to light.

I mean nobody is forcing you to use Edge or Chrome, there are better alternatives like Vivaldi or if you really want to take it to extreme Ungoogled Chromium. But I agree with your sentiment, although it just means you should probably move to open source and obscure options.

Also:

> Brave, Mozilla, and Vivadi have said they intend to continue supporting Manifest v2 extensions for an indeterminate amount of time.

The motivation is to keep up with Apple who themselves are trying to distinguish themselves from Google. Doesn’t need to be sinister. If your primary business model doesn’t depend on tracking people to sell ads, and you’re competing with someone else whose does, then leaning in to making the use of your software/hardware more private makes sense.

I noticed today I can't find the Chrome flag (v105) to enable its reader mode. It's like they just nuked it since it made articles actually readable. It's not a huge deal, but I liked not having to launch another service like Pocket.

> Why do I always get a bad feeling about the motivations behind stuff like this?

Because of microsoft history. Including recent history.

Exactly.. I would take it from Firefox if they offered something like iCloud Private Relay.

But the thing they offer from Mullvad is no better than a traditional VPN (because it is a traditional VPN). And even more limited because it only works in the browser.

And indeed the circumvention of Pihole is a big problem.

"bad feeling" is too generous. Microsoft is famous for its ubiquitous telemetry. It is not a suspicion, data collection is a fact. today. already.

IMO its so they can keep the data-usage metric in their hose and not leak it to other companies which are competing for ad attention...?

If you have never worked at a large tech company like Microsoft, you'll probably have a bad feeling because there's a lot you don't know about the business process of shipping features like this. It's reasonable to be cynical and confused if you have never seen it from the other side.

For the most part, product features like this are shipped for boring and completely non-nefarious reasons. It's just hard to believe that if you've never worked on one.

How is this not a transparent attempt to secure user information and conceil it from the usual other suspects?

No, yeah, it's sketchy as hell. Welp, another browser I'll never touch I guess.

Block UDP port 53(DNS).

The motivation here is surely reducing ad tracking.

just creating a honeypot for the 3 letters agency. Microsoft loves doing that. just dont use edge I guess?

Firefox, having your back since 2002.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com