Rendered at 16:57:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
ada-h00k 3 hours ago [-]
I think it's great that Firefox is finally doing more to combat fingerprinting. For a long time, they lagged a bit behind Brave in this regard. That said, unfortunately, neither browser has been able to do anything about Cloudflare Turnstile yet. Kagi, for example, uses it to fingerprint users.
There's a third option: allow bots and give them access as efficiently as possible.
As Reddit's API used to.
Don't want to? Tough, they'll do it the hard way and put more load on your servers and your countermeasures will drive away more humans than bots.
Of course our current bot plague doesn't understand this and seems to be optimizing for maximum server load, which is still bad.
locknitpicker 22 minutes ago [-]
> There's a third option: allow bots and give them access as efficiently as possible.
Why?
mkatx 60 seconds ago [-]
To make your data more accessible AND reduce server load. More and more people are using AI, so there will be more and more bots as the trend seems to be accessing data with your AI, and maybe, only sometimes, actually reviewing what it found. I'm afraid that if you don't at least start to consider how we might accommodate the bots, you'll be walling off more and more real users going forward.
seki285 44 minutes ago [-]
Or just block all bots and give them a big F U :)
hobo123 18 seconds ago [-]
Why shouldn't bots (who work on behalf of users after all) not get access to information?
I just found something via LLMs and bought it from a website that I would have never found with traditional search engines (because I didn't).
akersten 55 minutes ago [-]
Can you please tell whoever it is at Mozilla to stop working on that.
This feedback isn't directed at any one person but that proposal impressively suffers from the simultaneous problems of Being Way Too Fucking Complicated and Proposing to Make the Web Better but Actually Making it Way Worse (for Everyone Except Entrenched Megacorps). It's the exact same problem that Google's "anonymous ad attribution" attestation swarms suffered, and luckily that never came to pass.
From looking at the pictures in that article, it seems like in order for me to be able to browse "protected" sites (aka, most of the corporate-owned web, once they are aware that this exists and turn it on because "bots bad") my browser is going to have to negotiate for some scant amount of "allowed access" tokens or other such thing, through some complicated protocol that halts any chance of us realizing a future for the web that looks any much different from "locked down approved browsers visiting approved sites in an approved way."
The further we allow the Web to stray from cURL http://example.com Just Working, the worse off we all are. So to reiterate, this proposal looks insane and not at all aligned with Mozilla's mission...
asciimoo 1 hours ago [-]
Too bad they still generate a random unique ID for each installed extension that can expose a trackable UUID...
I'd like to have some of the APIs that read the data used to fingerprint browsers be behind a confirmation dialog per site similar to allowing popups or microphone/video access.
> Oh, I see that you'd like to read the canvas pixel data, let me check if that's okay with the user first.
ThePowerOfFuet 1 hours ago [-]
HTML5 canvas data access has been behind such a permission dialog on Firefox (at least on desktop) for a long time now.
idbehold 1 hours ago [-]
I'm on desktop Firefox v160.0 and I've never seen a permission dialog like that and under settings I see:
Permissions
Manage what websites can access, control, or trigger.
Location
Camera
Device apps and services
Local network devices
Microphone
Speaker
Notifications
Autoplay
Virtual reality
None of those seem to be for accessing canvas data.
theyeenzbeanz 2 hours ago [-]
One caveat I’ve experienced with Firefox branches that focus on privacy is I get “punished” with captchas from hell because I refuse to let websites siphon and prey on every last bit of private info. Hopefully this doesn’t succumb to the same issue.
orbisvicis 60 minutes ago [-]
I'm tired of identifying buses or stoplights or motorcycles up to five times a day just for Google searches. I'm slowly moving myself over to LLM queries instead.
nkmnz 1 hours ago [-]
Why do you want to use services that use such captchas? It’s like going to a club and complaining about the door policy. Don’t go if you don’t like it.
cowlevel 1 hours ago [-]
Thanks for reminding me that Elon Musk got rejected from Berghain.
4738837329 18 minutes ago [-]
Berghain, is that located in this failed state where arab gangs perpetrate daily shootings?
zx8080 3 hours ago [-]
Am I the only expecting it to completely break the sites behind cloudflare on Firefox?
rdmuser 2 hours ago [-]
Unless I'm misreading the post mentions that the most recent change was added to version 145 which released last year. Personally I haven't had any issues with cloudflare as a firefox user since then with strict mode enabled.
Surveillance fingerprinting will only end with major changes to the web.
If you are among those capable of 3rd order thinking or even just 2nd order thinking, and consider what kind of world you want to live in, you may already know that these changes must happen, even if that means the functional web is bifurcated for a while.
cowlevel 1 hours ago [-]
Are you talking about a return to a web of one-to-one connections, no broadcasts?
Actually the problem isn't broadcasts but reverse broadcasts. A broadcast sends one signal to all interested listeners - the problematic mode of the web is one listener getting all interested signals, which allows spam and propaganda (which are the same thing) to flood that set. Is there a word for this reverse broadcasting idea?
jdlshore 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe you can use your second-order thinking to consider how people might react to a sentence that starts “if you are among those capable of 3rd order thinking.”
asah 29 minutes ago [-]
-1 it's perhaps offensive but I agree with OP: 3rd order is *very* difficult to reason about, and even really smart, really experienced people have colossal failures at that level of reasoning-depth. It's not just probabilistic (e.g. chess, go), but in addition the way a decision-tree-branch is followed often deeply affects downstream decisions...
jon128 15 minutes ago [-]
See, this is more along what I expect from a place that titles itself "Hacker News".
The reason I mentioned 2nd order and 3rd order cognitive abstraction, is because to fix the web we need to make some tough decisions.
When technical enthusiasts such as people who call themselves "engineer" but aren't real engineers hear these things the response is "nobody is going to do $thing lol". Yet the more big brains are indeed talking about doing thing or lamenting the mal-growth we have collectively experienced, including the recognized inventor of the WWW.
The below is just off the top of my head, "in passing". Some people have done some work on parts of this picture already. Maybe I could post something more "formal" somewhere later on.
Before jumping in with "omg but then how would X/Y/Z work lol", use whatever 2nd order or 3rd order abstraction thinking you might have, and consider that those things were already considered by people working on these problems (or at least attempting to) and yes there are full answers or at least a couple of half-answers for those concerns.
Among those is content-addressing. This eliminates, by avoiding outright through design, most of the Cloudflare/Akamai, "verifying your connection", and captcha bullshit. This also means user metrics are opt-in, which maybe they could be by default unless a user turns it off, but then they would be easy to spoof (which they already are).
The major thing is no more untrusted Javascript and no more untrusted WASM unless loaded in a pop-up window as "external program". See the Free Software Foundation's stance on non-free Javascript. This stance isn't so "out there" to legitimate hackers.
Due to decisions made early on with processors and the feedback loop optimizing for certain styles of programming, our CPUs do speculative execution. Some developments have helped, but the only safe option for CPUs people actually use, which are not the second or third latest generation (often for chipset security concerns), require disabling Javascript JIT and WASM or Javascript all together.
Almost all of the widgets and doodads we need for the web have been figured out by now. We need a trusted collection of libraries for these things. This should include all of the extra fonts we want.
Any GPU/canvas stuff needs to be truly deterministic so as to be useless for fingerprinting.
No more User Agent string.
No more sending screen dimensions. Yes, how to contend with this has been thought of already.
Not every website should be "mobile friendly". Yes, you do need a fucking laptop/desktop to get by in the world. "I can do everything on my phone" is NGMI.
The whole CA thing needs a complete overhaul.
Cookies need to be handled in a way that users can hover over a browser tab and see what cookies are visible to the remote end of that browser tab, and cross-domain cookies must be explicitly allowed by a user.
There are very tough decisions and things that do require serious talent to innovate correctly in a way intuitive to users, that need to happen to eliminate
fingerprinting.
It's not those incapable of 3rd order cognitive abstraction who are going to dig us out of this mess. It's people who actually give a shit and think about these things a lot who will quietly implement the fixes and will never be renowned or heard of by the crab bucket mentality monkeys unless someone in authority tells them too.
jon128 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jdlshore 40 minutes ago [-]
I’ll spell it out for you: it comes across as condescending. Long-term, especially if you do this in real life too, that means people are less likely to listen to what you have to say, and makes you less effective at tasks that require other people’s cooperation.
Systemically, you might be thinking too much about rationalism, and feeling superior, and not enough about how your choices make other people feel. Feelings aren’t rational; in fact, studies of the brain show that feelings come first and the rational explanation comes later. The only way to elicit a rational response from people is to talk in a way that makes them feel interested in what you have to say, at that comes from how you say it as much as what you say.
(I do work at Mozilla but not on any of this.)
As Reddit's API used to.
Don't want to? Tough, they'll do it the hard way and put more load on your servers and your countermeasures will drive away more humans than bots.
Of course our current bot plague doesn't understand this and seems to be optimizing for maximum server load, which is still bad.
Why?
I just found something via LLMs and bought it from a website that I would have never found with traditional search engines (because I didn't).
This feedback isn't directed at any one person but that proposal impressively suffers from the simultaneous problems of Being Way Too Fucking Complicated and Proposing to Make the Web Better but Actually Making it Way Worse (for Everyone Except Entrenched Megacorps). It's the exact same problem that Google's "anonymous ad attribution" attestation swarms suffered, and luckily that never came to pass.
From looking at the pictures in that article, it seems like in order for me to be able to browse "protected" sites (aka, most of the corporate-owned web, once they are aware that this exists and turn it on because "bots bad") my browser is going to have to negotiate for some scant amount of "allowed access" tokens or other such thing, through some complicated protocol that halts any chance of us realizing a future for the web that looks any much different from "locked down approved browsers visiting approved sites in an approved way."
The further we allow the Web to stray from cURL http://example.com Just Working, the worse off we all are. So to reiterate, this proposal looks insane and not at all aligned with Mozilla's mission...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1717671
> Oh, I see that you'd like to read the canvas pixel data, let me check if that's okay with the user first.
It links to this post when talking about it: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/fingerprinting-protectio...
If you are among those capable of 3rd order thinking or even just 2nd order thinking, and consider what kind of world you want to live in, you may already know that these changes must happen, even if that means the functional web is bifurcated for a while.
Actually the problem isn't broadcasts but reverse broadcasts. A broadcast sends one signal to all interested listeners - the problematic mode of the web is one listener getting all interested signals, which allows spam and propaganda (which are the same thing) to flood that set. Is there a word for this reverse broadcasting idea?
The reason I mentioned 2nd order and 3rd order cognitive abstraction, is because to fix the web we need to make some tough decisions.
When technical enthusiasts such as people who call themselves "engineer" but aren't real engineers hear these things the response is "nobody is going to do $thing lol". Yet the more big brains are indeed talking about doing thing or lamenting the mal-growth we have collectively experienced, including the recognized inventor of the WWW.
The below is just off the top of my head, "in passing". Some people have done some work on parts of this picture already. Maybe I could post something more "formal" somewhere later on.
Before jumping in with "omg but then how would X/Y/Z work lol", use whatever 2nd order or 3rd order abstraction thinking you might have, and consider that those things were already considered by people working on these problems (or at least attempting to) and yes there are full answers or at least a couple of half-answers for those concerns.
Among those is content-addressing. This eliminates, by avoiding outright through design, most of the Cloudflare/Akamai, "verifying your connection", and captcha bullshit. This also means user metrics are opt-in, which maybe they could be by default unless a user turns it off, but then they would be easy to spoof (which they already are).
The major thing is no more untrusted Javascript and no more untrusted WASM unless loaded in a pop-up window as "external program". See the Free Software Foundation's stance on non-free Javascript. This stance isn't so "out there" to legitimate hackers.
Due to decisions made early on with processors and the feedback loop optimizing for certain styles of programming, our CPUs do speculative execution. Some developments have helped, but the only safe option for CPUs people actually use, which are not the second or third latest generation (often for chipset security concerns), require disabling Javascript JIT and WASM or Javascript all together.
Almost all of the widgets and doodads we need for the web have been figured out by now. We need a trusted collection of libraries for these things. This should include all of the extra fonts we want.
Any GPU/canvas stuff needs to be truly deterministic so as to be useless for fingerprinting.
No more User Agent string.
No more sending screen dimensions. Yes, how to contend with this has been thought of already.
Not every website should be "mobile friendly". Yes, you do need a fucking laptop/desktop to get by in the world. "I can do everything on my phone" is NGMI.
The whole CA thing needs a complete overhaul.
Cookies need to be handled in a way that users can hover over a browser tab and see what cookies are visible to the remote end of that browser tab, and cross-domain cookies must be explicitly allowed by a user.
There are very tough decisions and things that do require serious talent to innovate correctly in a way intuitive to users, that need to happen to eliminate fingerprinting.
It's not those incapable of 3rd order cognitive abstraction who are going to dig us out of this mess. It's people who actually give a shit and think about these things a lot who will quietly implement the fixes and will never be renowned or heard of by the crab bucket mentality monkeys unless someone in authority tells them too.
Systemically, you might be thinking too much about rationalism, and feeling superior, and not enough about how your choices make other people feel. Feelings aren’t rational; in fact, studies of the brain show that feelings come first and the rational explanation comes later. The only way to elicit a rational response from people is to talk in a way that makes them feel interested in what you have to say, at that comes from how you say it as much as what you say.