SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The Mozilla Foundation has announced its intent to reduce the ability of websites and other online services to track users of its Firefox browser around the internet.
At this stage, Moz's actions are baby steps. In support of its decision in late 2018 to reduce the amount of tracking it permits, the organisation has now published a tracking policy to tell people what it will block.
Moz said the focus of the policy is to bring the curtain down on tracking techniques that "cannot be meaningfully understood or controlled by users".
Notoriously intrusive tracking techniques allow users to be followed and profiled around the web. Facebook planting trackers wherever a site has a "Like" button is a good example. A user without a Facebook account can still be tracked as a unique individual as they visit different news sites. Mozilla's policy said these "stateful identifiers are often used by third parties to associate browsing across multiple websites with the same user and to build profiles of those users, in violation of the user's expectation". So, out they go.
Of course, that's not the only technique used for cross-site tracking. As detailed in Mozilla's policy, some sites "decorate" URLs with user identifiers to make the user identity available to other websites. Firefox isn't yet ready to block that kind of behaviour, but Mozilla said: "We may apply additional restrictions to the third parties engaged in this type of tracking in future."
Sites will be able to use URL parameters for activities such as advertisement conversion tracking, the policy said, so long as that isn't abused to identify individuals.
Mozilla has also flagged browser fingerprinting (tagging an individual by the fonts they have installed is the most familiar example) and supercookies for future removal.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Wednesday January 30 2019, @05:46PM (4 children)
I completely agree.
uMatrix is your friend.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 30 2019, @07:37PM (3 children)
I use uMatrix.
But it might not have a future if Google can remove a crucial API feature from what is going to be the guts most used in most of the world's browsers.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday January 31 2019, @03:12AM (2 children)
A bleak future! Although I've done various programming / sw. engineering I'm not really up on all of this. My stomach started to hurt when javascript started. And it's not that I object to browser / client-side scripting, but I strongly object to what it can do to my computer ... through the browser. Part of the solution is to browse in containers only.
But I understand it's in the browser code. Will google change chromium code? As in, anyone can fork the project and revert the change?
Is firefox the way forward?
Why in the crap did chrome become so popular? I don't get it. I don't see its advantage. It takes forever to load, it's very slow, UI sluggish / delayed response to everything I ask it to do. But I'm spoiled because I still use OldOpera a lot.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday January 31 2019, @02:50PM (1 child)
JavaScript can be used for many very good purposes.
Like any tool it can and will be misused. (Crowbar used to commit crime. Screwdriver used as a weapon.)
It might be desirable to have a general classification such as "Web Application" that requires the user's affirmative assent to use certain features, including JavaScript. A News Site should probably not be trusted as being a Web Application. Where Gmail would seem to actually be a Web Application.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:02PM
> Like any tool it can and will be misused. (Crowbar used to commit crime. Screwdriver used as a weapon.)
Exactly. However, the analogy falls apart because you can limit a crazy person's access to such things. Computers connected to a giant network pulling in code from millions of servers around the world is impossible to police (as we all know) so we need to protect the local computer and files, just like we protect our homes with locks and security systems.
Javascript is not to blame. Even MS isn't to blame for the widespread adoption of a toy OS being used for society's critical functions. The problem that I've personally seen for 30+ years is that non-technical people have more decision-making power than the technical people (like me). I would NEVER allow an insecure OS to be used for all that Windows has become the core of.
Browsers and OSes should NEVER allow the kind of access to the local computer and filesystem that they do. I was on a legitimate major website yesterday, tried to close the page, and a popup popped up asking me to confirm! I tried to close the browser, same thing! So javascript can completely override the user's control- of my own freaking computer? What? Who decided this is a good thing? Who put that functionality in the browser's code? I railed against javascript in 1998, and I was right: browsers and OSes have allowed javascript far too much power.
Now that the whole thing has grown and spread like a weed, the only safe way to browse is in a walled garden: containerized browsing.