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from the how-dare-anyone-lie-to-congress dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Mozilla is urging Congress to reject the broadband industry's lobbying campaign against encrypted DNS in Firefox and Chrome.
The Internet providers' fight against this privacy feature raises questions about how they use broadband customers' Web-browsing data, Mozilla wrote in a letter sent today to the chairs and ranking members of three House of Representatives committees. Mozilla also said that Internet providers have been giving inaccurate information to lawmakers and urged Congress to "publicly probe current ISP data collection and use policies."
DNS over HTTPS helps keep eavesdroppers from seeing what DNS lookups your browser is making. This can make it more difficult for ISPs or other third parties to monitor what websites you visit.
"Unsurprisingly, our work on DoH [DNS over HTTPS] has prompted a campaign to forestall these privacy and security protections, as demonstrated by the recent letter to Congress from major telecommunications associations. That letter contained a number of factual inaccuracies," Mozilla Senior Director of Trust and Security Marshall Erwin wrote.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Tuesday November 05 2019, @05:42AM (3 children)
Will Chrome or Firefox even use the hosts file? Good question.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 06 2019, @06:28PM (2 children)
Hmmmm. That question makes me wonder if you know how hosts files work. The application in use doesn't 'use' the hosts file. The application, let's say Firefox, tells your network that it wants to talk to blah-blah IP address. Your network does whatever you have configured it to do - check the hosts file, or not, use this proxy or not, use that proxy or not, use a VPN, or not. Firefox doesn't know anything about your network. Unless there are any addresses hard coded into the application, it only knows how to talk to your computer's network interface.
But, you know all of that, right? So - the purpose of your comment is to make us think? Hmmmmm. Oh-kay, I'm thinking. We already know that Microsoft has hardcoded addresses into it's new operating systems. Windows update and windows telemetry isn't going to be blocked by a simple hosts file, unless that file is on the router. So, maybe. I can see Chrome hard coding addresses into it's browser. I suppose that Firefox might follow suit one day, for reasons. Both of them may hard sell the concept as a safety feature. "If your network is corrupted, Firefox can still help you to log into your xxxxx.xxx account for support."
Whether you maintain your blocked sites list and/or hosts file manually, or with a script, those blocks really should be on your router, not on your daily driver computer(s).
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:25AM (1 child)
I know how hosts files work. I understand how DNS works (you sounded insulting BTW).
That was my whole point.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:16PM
Didn't mean to be insulting - was just kinda thinking out loud there.