Paranoid Browsing | Hacker News Reader

Paranoid Browsing

github.com

51 pointscyberviewer22 comments

Many organizations attempt to build a profile of you based on your browsing history. Paranoid Browsing confuses that effort by browsing the internet randomly in the background.

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Is there something similar to this for Firefox? The closest thing I have found is the TrackmeNot extension http://trackmenot.org/ http://www.cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

" TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and Bing. It hides users' actual search trails in a cloud of 'ghost' queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles. To better simulate user behavior TrackMeNot uses a dynamic query mechanism to 'evolve' each client (uniquely) over time, parsing the results of its searches for 'logical' future query terms with which to replace those already used."

Here's a paper they wrote on resisting surveillance in web search. http://www.cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/TMN-Howe-Niss08-ch23.pdf

this is cute, but it's not going to help against the kind of things we've seen from the nsa recently. the analysis there (and the stuff from palantir etc) is simply looking for a positive signal - a single connection. the kinds of algorithms used (graph based) don't normalise by the total number of connections (it's not statistical, it's structural). so having a bunch of "normal" stuff won't change anything.

OK, so add in searches for bomb-making and forums that a terrorist would likely visit. Get lots of people to use your extension and generate lots of false positives.

Again you fail. Those who will truly abuse this system will not be looking for true positives. They will be looking for excuses. Such a system would provide them with excuses aplenty to drag someone away and lock them up for a while, until they show the proper love and respect to the system.

I completely appreciate what you're saying here, and I think you're absolutely correct... However framing your insight with "Again you fail" makes me respect your opinion less. As someone who had a similar idea to the person you replied to, and as someone who comes to HN to have "smarter people in the room", it's this kind of condescension that keeps me from commenting on HN.

Sorry for the mini-rant, your three word comment doesn't really warrant it but hopefully you can respect why I took the time to type it.

I am not that long around at HN, but isn't that kind of comments unavoidable in the Internet?

Not in these parts. They've been creeping in, but incivility is still heavily downvoted here.

Voted up, but I think (hope) he meant it in the sense of "And even that is not enough."

Reading it again, you might have it right... in which case I feel bad for offering up criticism when it is surely better deserved elsewhere.

Yes, sorry - I did not mean it in a derogatory sense, more like "Even with these changes the idea won't work". In hindsight, a far too aggressive way to state it, mea culpa!

This is one of the reasons I am running a Tor exit relay.

Plausible deniability assuming you have a competent lawyer/judge?

Well, I don't have a lawyer (or a judge for that matter...)

And I wouldn't use my own ip (exit node) to do anything that isn't boring. I'd switch to Tor.

The Idea sounds good, but lately I was downloading a lot of plug-ins to go "anonym".

How 'bout a combined plug-in that contains the following:

-No-script

-No-cache

-Clearing browser history every x days -Entering random results into history

-Disables tracking (I'm not sure what how normal tracking works on a technical side, so sorry if that's a double with some function above)

Additionally you should be able to make exceptions from the restrictions, for specific websites. (Like you can in the No-Script add-on, that you might know)

I believe most of it can be done using multiple plug-ins, but there seem to be space for new inventions.

This has been done many times before. One such example:

AntiPhorm Lite - http://tweaks.com/forum/Topic239854-59-1.aspx

what if this puts something in your history that is illegal?

Can the environmentalists please start lobbying for sensible Internet laws now?

Wouldn't disconnect.me be a better option?

As I understand it, disconnect.me handles tracking cookies and the like, which is fine for protection against third parties, while Paranoid Browsing throws chaff at the ISP, NSA, etc.

haha this is glorious!

How do I turn this into a chrome extension?

Visit chrome://extensions/

Check 'Developer mode'

Click 'Load unpacked extension...'

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