nativeit

I don’t think it was the author’s intent to shock us by the state of CATV infrastructure.

How to scream, “I’m living a life of unalloyed privilege.”

Most privacy-thumping browsers do this, to some degree, but it’s not a panacea. The article gets into it.

The problem we’re falling into under this (ostensibly accurate) point is when we start making this a game, where fingerprinting is either “100% effective and insidious”, or “can’t be 100% certain 100% of the time, so it’s ineffective and nobody will use it against me”.

The point is that a sufficiently motivated actor could use a very broad array of tactics, some automated and some manual, to identify, observe, track, and/or locate a target. Maybe they can’t pin you down with your browser fingerprints because you’ve been smart enough to use tools that obfuscate it, but that’s not happening in a vacuum. Correlating one otherwise useless datapoint that happens to persist long enough to tie things together at even low-ish confidence is still a hugely worthwhile sieve with which to filter people out of the possibility pool.

The problem isn’t that it doesn’t affect most average people, or that it it’s terribly imprecise. The problem is that it’s even a little effective, while being nearly impossible to completely avoid. It’s also a problem if that’s used by a malicious state actor against a journalist, to pick a rather obvious example. Because even in isolation, this kind of violation of civil liberties necessarily impacts all of society.

The public should be given more information and control, broadly speaking, for when they are asked to trade their rights for convenience, security, and/or commerce. In particular, I think the United States has allowed bad faith arguments against regulatory actions and basic consumer rights so corporate lobbyists can steamroll any chance of even baseline protections. It would behoove all of us to be more distrustful of companies and moneyed interests, while being more engaged with, and demanding of, our governments.

Give each of them $0.25/mo, and you’ll probably 10x-100x what they’re currently getting from you watching ads.

Beyond the notion that no org should be trusted implicitly, why would the EFF specifically be untrustworthy?

Is this before or after ICE became a $150B secret paramilitary beholden to a corrupt authoritarian with a large cohort of sycophantic tech billionaires?

This is also covered in the article. I appreciated the analogy they used: You can put on a ski mask when you go to the mall, and it will conceal your identity, but you will also be instantly suspicious to everyone around you, and will likely be asked to leave most of the stores you try to visit.

I guess it’s fortunate that this quote only includes a portion of the assertion they’re making. What happens when you include the rest?

As near as I can tell, it’s always been owned by Cliqz, who produced some privacy-focused browsers (named Dawn or Lumen) and a search engine (Tailcat) that was ultimately purchased by Brave. The whole thing is majority owned by a German media group, Hubert Burda Media, and while its missions towards increased privacy seem to be sincere, I don’t know if I’d trust them implicitly.

All that said, the main project looks to be open sourced under a GPL3 license, so distrust and verify: https://github.com/ghostery

Has anyone wrote software that automatically surfaces the relevant XKCD comic for every article this happens under?

I’d like a feature in my HN reader that sticks a red button at the bottom anytime XKCD has already made the points I’m reading.

You said it better than I did.

The article also mentions this, and suggests the UA is not a silver bullet. That said, they didn’t go into specifics. I’m assuming there are other details that correlate to particular browsers that will betray a false UA. Plus, having a UA that says Chrome while including an extension that’s exclusive to Safari (tor example) will not only contradict the UA, but it will also be a highly distinctive datapoint for fingerprinting, in and of itself.

Key word there is “current”. It’s quickly moving the other way.

How about it leaving it disabled and letting me enable it immediately if/when I choose.

I do, but I also benefit from the fact that Chrome is basically everywhere already, so I use Firefox as my primary browser, and just break out Chrome when I need to flash some devices with ESPHome or something.

I can’t figure out why they couldn’t just fund a first-party extension to add AI features.

Forks exist

I keep hearing this, but I haven’t seen any convincing evidence there are no alternatives.

Maybe talk to the recently resigned Japanese translation team leader about how good AI translations are.

Lol.

> Could Not Give Kudos

>Kudos could not be given to the message for the following reason: > Kudos Flood: You have exceeded the limit of 10 kudoed messages per minute.

Enough said. There are simply too many people telling Mozilla to fuck right off for me to Kudo them all.

I feel like a HAM license is something of an inevitability of my future, although I don’t have any practical need for one. Catching satellite signals in my backyard is a lot of fun.

Good coffee and/or long walks.

Any reason why extensions couldn’t fill these niches?

lol. Available languages include 4 kinds of Dutch/German, 3 kinds of French, 2 kinds of Netherlands, 2 kinds of Swiss, 1 kind of Spanish, and no English. Really defined their market, I suppose.

Apparently not.

It’s my primary browser on every device, I use Windows, Linux, and Apple devices daily. I can’t remember the last time it crashed (if ever). I also use a ton of extensions, some of which are a little sketchy (devlopment-wise, nothing morally questionable). Still, no technical issues at all. The behavior of Mozilla, on the other hand, I take plenty of issue with.

Edit: correcting autocorrect.

You certainly have a style. Much better: how would you run Mozilla/develop Firefox?

Any answer that’s not fully bulletproof immediately rules any other opinions you may hold illegitimate.

/s

I missed the part where the parent commenter applied for the job.

I’m gonna need that translated for me.