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Comment by orng | Hacker News Reader

Simple workaround: don't use safari. Long term solution: don't by Apple products. Or at least don't run their software.

Not quite sure why you got down voted. I bought an iPod nano several years ago, because I quite liked the hardware/software that Apple made. However when I found out that they intentionally broke compatibility with 3rd party music software that isn't iTunes, I made the decision to never buy Apple products again.

I don't feel that I'm particularly missing out by making this decision (although I am aware that many other vendors probably have similar ethical problems associated with them).

Can you link to an explanation of how Apple intentionally broke 3rd-party syncing with iPod Nanos? I don't know what kerfuffle you're referencing.

It's long enough ago that a lot of the technical information has dropped off the web (or in some cases been DMCAed offline by Apple[1]), but the short answer is they started authenticating the iPod Nano music database using a cryptographic MAC with a per-device key derived using a secret algorithm. Without the key, third-party software couldn't add or remove songs. They've got more aggressive about it with each generation too; for the 5th gen iPod Nano the code to generate the key had the same kind of obfuscation as their actual DRM code[2], and there's no open source support for the 6th gen because it's just too hard to reverse-engineer.

[1] http://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/11/20/201246/apple-dmcas-ip...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20080901013029/http://www.bluwik...

http://boingboing.net/2007/09/14/new-ipods-reengineer.html

So the 2007 version of the iPod refused to work with some random 3rd party software you had, and you've sworn off all Apple products for life?

That's just childish. Not only can companies change but one product doesn't necessarily reflect everything a company has to offer. You should stop being such an ideologue and learn to use the best tool for the job. Which is sometimes an Apple product.

Of you know: http://imgur.com/tfjoo2k an even simpler workaround.

Who's products would you suggest as an alternative?

For browsing, Mozilla is probably the least likely to want to do this sort of logging. There are probably more niche browsers that focus on privacy that I'm unaware of too.

As for other Apple products, you can run Linux on a MacBook quite happily (Linus does, after all) and there are some nice Android ROMs which focus on freedom, such as Replicant.

Epic Privacy Browser - private browser built on chromium for Mac & PCs -- epicbrowser.com (one such niche privacy browser)

[Citation Needed]

Mozilla's "Safe browsing", for instance.

If you're going to go with something FF based, at least choose something with such things disabled by default. For instance, I run PM.

Firefox Nightly also has a tracking protection in about:config => privacy.trackingprotection.enabled its off by default

seems to also block some adverts when on. (probably because those adverts are also trackers)

Wait. People are upset about how unintuitive Apple's preferences are, but Firefox having config hidden away in the advanced about:config is OK?

Nope. Firefox hide away stuff in about:config for testing purposes generally and expose the setting in the user interface after its been tested enough.

Sounds logical enough to me.

Mozilla safe browsing does NOT phone home with sites you're visiting.

Quote:

> Before blocking the site, Firefox will request a double-check to ensure that the reported site has not been removed from the list since your last update.

Source: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-m...

Pretty sure it's still actually sending a hash, not a URL

The entity I'm primarily worried about tracking here is Google.

And, pretty much trivially, if the URL was added to the blacklist, they have the corresponding URL to the hash.

(Not to mention, even if they didn't, their core product is based around crawling webpages. I'd be highly surprised if they didn't have hashes of the URLs they visited.)

And, even beside that, URLs are relatively low-entropy. Especially with the path-splitting that safe-browsing does.

I think your fears are unfounded, but it's easy enough to turn off.

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