109 points Vinnl 4 hours ago 24 comments
ada-h00k 2 hours ago | parent
Vinnl 2 hours ago | parent
(I do work at Mozilla but not on any of this.)
cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent
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.
akersten 49 minutes ago | parent
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...
zx8080 2 hours ago | parent
pelcg 2 hours ago | parent
rdmuser 2 hours ago | parent
It links to this post when talking about it: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/fingerprinting-protectio...
jon128 1 hour ago | parent
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.
jdlshore 1 hour ago | parent
asah 23 minutes ago | parent
jon128 9 minutes ago | parent
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 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.
cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent
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?
idbehold 1 hour ago | parent
> 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 hour ago | parent
idbehold 1 hour ago | parent
Permissions
Manage what websites can access, control, or trigger.
Location
Camera
Device apps and services
Local network devices
Microphone
Speaker
Notifications
Autoplay
Virtual reality
theyeenzbeanz 1 hour ago | parent
nkmnz 1 hour ago | parent
orbisvicis 54 minutes ago | parent
asciimoo 1 hour ago | parent