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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Google made a change in Chrome 57 that removes options from the browser to manage plugins such as Google Widevine, Adobe Flash, or the Chrome PDF Viewer.
If you load chrome://plugins in Chrome 56 or earlier, a list of installed plugins is displayed to you. The list includes information about each plugin, including a name and description, location on the local system, version, and options to disable it or set it to "always run".
You can use it to disable plugins that you don't require. While you can do the same for some plugins, Flash and PDF Viewer, using Chrome's Settings, the same is not possible for the DRM plugin Widevine, and any other plugin Google may add to Chrome in the future.
Starting with Chrome 57, that option is no longer available. This means essentially that Chrome users won't be able to disable -- some -- plugins anymore, or even list the plugins that are installed in the web browser.
Please note that this affects Google Chrome and Chromium.
Source: http://www.ghacks.net/2017/01/29/google-removes-plugin-controls-from-chrome/
(Score: 2) by Bobs on Tuesday January 31 2017, @03:31PM
I have recently been experimenting with TOR as my web browser.
Based upon a Mozilla core.
Seems to work fine for reading most pages, so why not? And it helps to improve the noise to signal ratio for people doing things requiring privacy.
https://www.torproject.org [torproject.org]
Any downsides I should be aware of?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @04:32PM
I have recently been experimenting with TOR as my web browser. ... Any downsides I should be aware of?
Simply using the TOR browser, you're on several TLA (Three Letter Agency) lists, now. If you're also an exit node, expect to be harassed at some point. Unfortunately, the pursuit of freedom isn't free.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Tuesday January 31 2017, @06:21PM
Duh, nobody is an exit node. Anyone who attempted would be promptly arrested for downloading child porn. Which is why the three letter agencies operate all of the exit nodes, they are the only ones who can both ignore all of the world's laws requiring shutting down IPs downloading copyright material and child porn AND have the mega bandwidth needed. Oh Hell yea, sign me up for TOR!
All of the original design papers on TOR were clear that the one failure mode they couldn't assure a defense against was an opponent who could see all of the traffic at the exit nodes. But they assured everyone that couldn't happen since all the 'privacy advocates' would be running exit nodes. That stopped being true years ago and there has been no warning sounded. Trap. They continue to use a full featured scripting browser based on Firefox that has known exploits at least yearly and TOR sites have as many webbugs and trackers as normal http traffic to make it easy for the intelligence agencies to hide their tracking. Trap.
A true secure network would be based on dumb browsers that can't be exploited. If not lynx, closer to it. Certainly no CSS/DOM/Javascript foolishness. The only "user agent" string would be "unspecified" or at most a simple version number of the TOR VM image used. All images would be gif/jpg/png, the image parser libs would be written to be brutally enforcing at the expense of speed. Flash/PDF/Java would be banned or at least "click to enable" after a warning you were probably about to be exploited and have your location revealed. TOR is a trap to suck gullible people into thinking they are private again, like they thought about the Internet in general fifteen to twenty years ago, so they will do stupid things again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @04:06PM
There're some legit exit nodes. For example, there was that minor kerfuffle when Boing Boing got a federal supernal over a exit node they ran.
Still, you'd have to be some half crazy person who's deadly serious about online freedoms to be willing to run an exit node. Even if I was such a person I'd probably try to have every protection possible. Eg. everything involved in the node is run by a corporation, have a lawyer on speed dial just in case.