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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

I have never regretted my decision to aggressively block ads on every device I use, and to shun devices where I can't.

I am not sure that ad blocking is enough now or in the future as fingerprinting is extremely hard to fight while keeping a convenient web experience. Of course, continue blocking for convenience, but for privacy, more robust solutions are needed. Try to beat this: https://fingerprint.com

Doesn't this just identify you as "that one guy who blocks fingerprinting"?

It's similar to when you use Linux or an obscure privacy-preserving browser. You've made yourself way more unique just by doing that.

(I'm not sure how the math works out though, vs. actually running all that nasty tracking stuff.)

There are dozens of us!

But, yeah, anti-fingerprinting is still a useful signal if less people do it. So more people should do it; especially if they're less likely to be targeted.

"More haystack" makes their job harder.

i feel like this is the same as voting independant. it's the right idea in theory, but given the fact that 99% of people don't do it , righteousness is decreased. in this case very literally as having a unique fingerprint is entirely counter intuitive to the idea of privacy

It starts with you. Doesn't matter if others won't. You can't expect anything to chamge if you, yourself, are not willing to change.

I really want to be in a world where that's true. in the meantime we live in a zero sum survival of the fittest game where the powerful execute the weak for insubordination. in this world it is often necessary to take roundabout paths to reach the objective.

for example, a constitutional representative in my country attempted to place restrictions on unfettered gambling advertisements. a single day later, photos emerged of that politician having dressed as a nazi for a costume party in his youth. that politician stood up for what was right and then got fired for it, by losing his job and his status in the court of public opinion, effectively achieving no change.

exacting change isnt always such a simple process as embodying the end result.

iPhone with private relay seems to defeat that

I beat it with Firefox, UBO, standard Firefox advanced tracking protection, and a VPN.

It was able to track me as long as my IP address didn't change, but as soon as I switched VPN endpoints, it gave me a new identifier.

Same thing here (Firefox + Arkenfox + uBlock Origin). Need to change the IP to beat the fingerprinter, but that is just how the Internet works and the browser itself cannot do anything about it.

Beginning to wonder if convenience is the root of all evil, and not money. Money's just a proxy for convenience.

More of us should learn to do things the hard way more often, and to be familiar with less-convenient things. There are life-changing advantages to doing things the hard way at least some of the time.

The root of all evil is that we don't have a functioning micro transaction network and we don't know how to build one.

For the user there is no way to pay the 0.0000001c that it takes to load a web page, for the web master there is no way to get paid the $10,000 it takes to serve the users. So we settled on advertising which can somewhat cover those costs since each individual add is basically worthless but an add campaign isn't.

The lightning network supports transactions starting from 1 Satoshi.

One Satoshi is currently worth $0.000713.

So what's the transaction fees to make 1e9 one satoshi payments and how long until they clear?

And how do you actually identify who should pay that $0.000713? And who should receive it? How do you make the process effortless, so the user doesn't have to spend 5 minutes registering on a website, just to send $0.000713?

Now make it work 10,000 times per day, for every page you visit, posts, news, short form content you scroll, long form video you watch. And multiply this by billions of users.

And once you've done that, how do you deal with spam, bots? How do you prevent invalid traffic? Fraudulent chargebacks? And how do you take quality into consideration (NYT prob want to charge more than my crappy personal blog)?

Transferring money is one small element of large and complex equation.

Advertising is not perfect, but it's the best alternative for a free and open web I have seen in my 30+ years online. Subscription works for large ticket items (and for the affluent minority), but it doesn't solve the other 95% of cases.

AI fixed that by calling it a token...

I know it's a cliché, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. People forget, most evil is created by good people trying to do good. The biggest trick the devil played was making us all believe evil is (always) easy to identify. But all the sayings are about how the devil is sly, tricks you, and sneaks up on you. All of that is to remind us how hard it is to do good. You don't have to be an evil person to create evil. Often you don't have to do anything at all, as inaction is still an action. Pull the lever or not, you've still made a decision.

The problem is so complex that every action you take compounds and extends far beyond what you realize. Especially as we're living in such a connected world. Those ripples propagate through all the ponds we've connected together.

I don't think it's money, convenience, or any of that. I think it's just that the world is getting more and more complicated. That our actions and inactions have larger and larger effects. We've done a lot of good, but we've also made it a lot easier to feel the flapping of a butterfly's wings on the other side of the planet.

> most evil is created by good people trying to do good

Citation needed.

Look at your username then look at mine.

You ask me to prove something essentially unprovable. Prove to me that most evil is created by people trying to do evil. It'll be equally as difficult to prove as you can't look in the minds of those doing evil. And you also can't trust what's coming out of their mouth.

I gave you some evidence in indirect form. I'll give you another saying: "for the greater good." There's no doubt people doing wrong want to justify their actions so that they do not view themselves as evil. So go ahead and look at your username and look at mine, then follow the line of logic

Ok, since you don't care about evidence-based reasoning, I say: You are wrong. Most evil is created by people trying to do evil.

If you're going to troll, do better. You can't just pretend to be illiterate. You know I gave evidence lol

Ah my apologies, I forgot to cite my source, which is the devil (just a coincidence it's the same as yours).

Yeah I have been doing that for years now. I do most things the hard way. I forgot exactly how it started. I think it started when I decided I wanted to develop my own sense of discipline. I think right after I read the constructive living book by David K. Reynolds. The premise, as I understand it, is that depression is a direct result of not taking full responsibility and immediate action in your life.

Looking back, I realize that started me on the path of not doing things the easy way. It was really hard a first, but over time it got easier. Most people in my line of work don't take accurate notes of what has transpired, don't keep a proper history of business exchanges and don't have clear agreements and contracts in place that spell out what is expected. Once I started this process of improving my life, I realized the more I made the effort to keep detailed track of everything I do/did, my life and business started to improve. I think you are right, taking to the most convenient path in life is a sure way to bring about pain and suffering.

> I know it's a cliché, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

"Kindly let me help you, or you will drown, said the monkey as it put the fish safely up a tree"

—Alan Watts

Wrong parent?

> if convenience is the root of all evil

Convenience is how we describe efficiency when it applies to non-classically “productive” endeavors. (Analogous to how we rebrand efficiency as sustainability when it applies to material and energy inputs.)

> Beginning to wonder if convenience is the root of all evil, and not money.

Self-deception is actually the root of all evil, not money nor convenience.

What does "try to beat this" mean?

I just opened it in another browser and got another ID. Did I win?

For some reason using Microsoft Edge is deemed suspicious.

Fingerprinting generally tries to identify a unique browser, so a new browser will get a new identifier.

But depending on the data tied to the fingerprints, identifiers can be linked together.

The EFF's fingerprint test is nice in that it breaks down a lot of the bits of data used, and lets you know how you compare etc:

> https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

You quickly discover how difficult it really is to avoid a unique fingerprint.

Lots of folks in this thread are focusing on DNS and VPN to avoid detection, which of course can help, but a huge number of identifiable bits come from your browser's APIs:

User Agent

Screen Size and Color Depth

System Fonts

Hash of canvas fingerprint

Hash of WebGL fingerprint

WebGL Vendor & Renderer

Touch Support

AudioContext fingerprint

Hardware Concurrency

Device Memory

Platform

Language

Timezone

Timezone offset

Browser Plugin Details

etc etc

> https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

I get "Our tests indicate that you have some protection against Web tracking, but it has some gaps." but nothing of too much importance I think.

I use a VPN and NextDNS.io.

The real test is whether the site believes you to be unique, which is listed separately. It reports me as "Our tests indicate that you have strong protection against Web tracking.", but I'm still uniquely identifiable.

Do not trust the EFF !!!

In Tor got: "Our tests indicate that you have you have strong protection against Web tracking."

In normal Firefox: "uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading:

https://eviltracker.net/kcarter-reporting-nojs?a="

In normal Firefox with 'real tracking company' ON (default): "uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading:

https://trackersimulator.org/kcarter-reporting-nojs"

Sort of failed?

> Try to beat this: https://fingerprint.com

I beat it, I think... nothing much there. I use a VPN and NextDNS.io.

you can't beat it with a VPN, or any sort of networking only solution, only your browser can prevent fingerprinting. The hash is generated on a combination of heuristics but usually based on canvas fingerprinting. Network fingerprinting is not reliable.

https://browserleaks.com/

Use Mullvad Browser or Brave (both require no extensions to block ads, with mullvad browser being modelled off of tor. Use data traffic fingerprint obfuscation even behind vpn (yes they can tell if you're messaging, watching a video, torrenting, etc 90% of the time even behind vpn) use mullvads daita (makes packets the same size) or nymvpn (mixnet with tor like routing and in built delays). Tor doesn't protect against traffic analysis at all.

> Try to beat this: https://fingerprint.com

I don’t know, but it seems like it’s overselling its capabilities. I tried with Firefox Focus and it said I’m using incognito (private mode) and assigned a unique visitor ID. Immediately tried with a private tab in Safari on iOS and it said I’m not using incognito (private mode) and assigned a new unique visitor ID. Then I switched networks and tried. One more unique visitor ID.

I’m not claiming that fingerprinting is not possible, but this website is not good at it. Seems like it uses plain cookies.

"Enable JS to run the demo"

You will also want to turn off things like weather widgets, basically anything that hits an external service.

The Web is utterly unusable without uBlock Origin.

I cant see how people use the net without it.. My wife gets all these ad popups and she is so use to it that it doesn't even register until I point it out.

Honestly, ublock isn't even enough anymore. DNS sinkholes are the next layer, since they work device-wide. I use nextdns.io, and it's good enough that I just keep ublock around in case I need to disable nextdns for some reason.

How is DNS going to prevent javascript/css/tls fingerprinting? Its a good thing to do, but its not preventing you from being identified and tracked.

I use Mullvad DNS with ad and malware filtering.

uBlock Origin does not protect you from this, this is a fingerprinting problem. You need to use a fingerprinting resistant browser. And even then, there are new fingerprinting methods emerging frequently and you can't prevent fingerprinting from inside apps on android/iOs..

Most slop mobile applications, that many people have on their phones are basically spyware pretending to be games/whatever.

Programatic advertising technology was created for intelligence purposes, these companies and their methods are very sophisticated.

> you can't prevent fingerprinting from inside apps on android/iOs..

Another good reason to run Graphene without proprietary apps.

Fingerprinting is insideous because the harder you try to prevent it the more unique you become. The best method is to try to create fake data to make the fingerprint useless.

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