> Source not available, no acknowledgement or explanation as to why
> Hacker News upvotes it to the front page
(menubar File => Work offline)
It applies to the whole browser, not the current tab. But good enough.
1. starts by suggesting devTools, which is simple, elegant, and wrong.
2. improves by suggesting the "Work Offline" menu option of the File menu, which is hidden by default on both Windows and Linux, and also wrong.
3. improves to a state of minimal functionality with implicitly ordered steps to use Private Browsing, Offline Mode, and confidential file "upload." And, I guess, always remembering to close all private browsing windows upon completion?
I'll rankly speculate f this ever caught on, 25% of users will forget to check offline mode until after they have finished editing their confidential document, 40% will leave a stray Private Browsing window open at all times, 10% will accidentally continue doing all their browsing in the same Private Browsing window, and 1% will somehow paste their private GPG keys in the query string of the URL.
Websites are not meant to not use the internet.
[0] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/network/reference...
1. Install ServiceWorker.
2. Save data to LocalStorage/IndexedDB/ServiceWorker Cache/ServiceWorker Memory.
3. Wait for devtools to be closed, enabling internet access, send data from ServiceWorker.
Work around that.
Easy. I use HTTP/3.
No, really, HTTP and SOCKS proxies cannot carry QUIC traffic, so browsers don't even try. They just send it right through.
If you block UDP, I guess I can still try DNS for exfil. HTTP proxies don't support DNS, and browsers need to be explicitly configured to proxy DNS through SOCKS, if the SOCKS proxy even supports it. Chances are, DNS exfil will work.
Now, if you were to do what I do to disable network access, then I'd have no chance: network namespace in a jail with zero network interfaces (not even loopback).
edit: tested this the old-fashioned way with Firefox 116.0.3 on Ubuntu and nginx 1.25.1. Firefox does connect over HTTP 3 and CORRECTLY DOESN'T CONNECT AT ALL with a (bad) proxy configured. You are spreading FUD.
My Chrome 115.0.5790.170 doesn't seem to use HTTP 3 at all.
That's what I thought, at first. But, back when Chrome introduced QUIC, this was a known phenomenon in proxy-restricted but not-UDP restricted setups. I doubt I'd be able to find a bug report for it, given Google's nature, but there's a few reports[1][2][3] by proxy vendors asking for QUIC to be disabled or traffic will go through, even when Chrome is configured to use a proxy.
And here's[4] a user report with the same observation, with Chrome connecting directly to its mothership without going through the configured proxy. The user reports successful blocking upon disabling QUIC
1: https://www.currentware.com/support/disable-quic/
2: https://support.umbrella.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051232032-...
3: https://support.forcepoint.com/customerhub/s/article/0000154...
4: https://superuser.com/questions/1688524/why-google-com-doesn...
> You are spreading FUD.
I assure you, I had no such intention. I was just reporting from memory, of years ago, back when I was in college and had to deal with a proxy-restricted network, and QUIC was being rolled out.
> My Chrome 115.0.5790.170 doesn't seem to use HTTP 3 at all.
Maybe your Chrome has HTTP/3 blocked for some reason. Or, more likely, Chrome supports a different draft of the HTTP/3 spec than the server you're testing against. It has a history of doing that too.
In this thread we were talking about the user willingly configuring a proxy in the browser or OS.
Sorry, I didn't look too closely through any of those links, because I never used those specific products myself.
But I do clearly remember this being an issue for me back in the day. So I dug further. You'll be happy to see this bug report[1] and this commit[2]. Note these words from a Chromium dev: "This code was written when we discovered a problem with QUIC bypassing proxies."
1: Issue 389684: QUIC bypasses proxy settings | https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=389684
2: Issue 217783003: Do not use QUIC for requests that are through a proxy. | https://codereview.chromium.org/217783003
Yeah, I agree. I should've checked the validity before posting it, instead of just going by memory from years ago.
> ... finding this reference ...
It was a lot more effort than I'd have liked to put into my original comment, but hey, I was ticked off by your accusation of spreading FUD. Also didn't help that search engines today aren't what they used to be.
Why can I not simply disable network access in the app settings? Why am I not being asked to grant this permission just like I'm asked to grant access to my photos?
Permissions systems on desktop platforms are mostly useless for regular users and only somewhat less useless on mobile.
Perhaps with the source you could setup an offline server on your own computer so you don't have to upload your data anywhere?
Without the source, you can't trust binary blobs. That was just a reflection why people want the source.