typis7

The article mentions the difficulty of preserving or changing the privacy settings in Windows.

Ironically if you want to prevent Firefox to "phone home", you will have performs many obscure tasks:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/

Some of those require changing the internals of Firefox: about:config.

I wish Firefox would just have a big red button, Disable All, instead or requiring me to preform all the tasks listed in the link, when I install Firefox. Or even better, make those choices opt-in, instead of opt-out.

Don't forget that you can whitelist domains, or disable/enable them per session.

Pretty much this: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

Note that certain adware/spyware domains, like google-analytics( look at the tags <maybe-spy> and <maybe-ads> ), are commented out, so edit the file as per your needs.

Google's re-capthas are coming from google.com, to block them add:

127.0.0.1 google.com

127.0.0.1 www.google.com

This may be a tough choice to make, depending on how integrated has Google become with your life ( note how I phrased this relationship ).

Where is the information being scraped from?

I looked at the source but I'm hardly a JS/Web expert.

Seems to be from here:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/RCStream

but only found a list of weird addresses: https://github.com/hatnote/listen-to-wikipedia/search?utf8=%...

Don't worry, there are additional blocked domains just for that. :-)

Captchas are dismissive towards users.

You throw humans and robots in the same basket and tell all of them to solve a puzzle or you won't talk to them.

I blocked the domain. If the site presents me with a re-captcha, I don't even have to think whether to use that site.

Practically speaking, you will get advertisements, that have a measurably larger chance of you following up on them, i.e. targeted adds.

Fabricating facts and using ad-hominem is not a very good way of backing up your arguments.

Quote from the paper: We use the public GREYC keystroke benchmark database for this work. It is one of the largest databases (in term of number of users and sessions) in keystroke dynamics. To out knowledge, no existing database contains more individuals. In order to reduce the bias due to this high quantity of male information, we only kept the first n male samples( where n is the number of female samples).

( Don't bother with your response, I won't be reading it. )

By knowing in advance what the ratio is. Such a great system will do really well in the real world.

( You have a very ironic username given the circumstances. )

I wonder how popular are NoScript/AdBlock percentage wise these days?

I think you misunderstood the intention of this feature. The goal is to identify and/or profile users that themselves use just a regular log-in. This can be then used to improve targeted marketing, selling that information to third-parties for example.

Note how the article mentions that the gender can be determined after a few keystrokes, even though the user never entered that specific information. This is certainly not the only metric that can be identified. The point of the article is to develop a solution to prevent leakage of private/personal information.