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Tor at the Heart: Firefox
- nmy 10y agoIt will increase security and privacy in Firefox, that's great.
- saurik 10y agoWhy did they make up this term "uplift" instead of just saying "upstream"?
- belorn 10y agoThe article describes it as upstream patch that is disabled by default which allow Firefox to be less discriminative when it comes to accepting patches.
- saurik 10y agoThat sentence did not read to me as a definition, and the sentence still works for me using the normal "upstreamed".
- mburns 10y agohttps://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Uplift_rules https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Uplift_rules
- akavel 10y agoTruth said, I can't find an explanation/definition of what actually an "uplift" means there?
- gsnedders 10y agoTypically landing a patch on a release branch, "uplifting" it from the main development branch (but occasionally uplifting it from thin air into the release branch).
- leojackson 10y agoIt looks like this page is designed for people who already know what an "uplift" is, but wish to implement it properly. That being said, it also appears that "uplifts" will include bug fixes made in Tor Browser and sent upstream to Firefox, rather than just features added (but disabled by default) as was implied in the OP article. I would have assumed that bug fixes made in a downstream product would already have a mechanism to find their way to Firefox. Maybe "uplift" was the term all along for that mechanism, or is a rebranding of it?
- selenamarie 10y agoUplift to us is bringing the patches into mozilla-central pref'd off so that Tor developers can just pref features on, rather than re-merge patches for each major and dot release. We also add tend to add tests.
- hsivonen 10y agoThat page doesn't explain the use of "uplift" to mean what's commonly called "upstreaming". That page refers to "uplift" meaning a patch being added to an older Firefox branch ahead of normal whole-branch promotion. (I.e. cherry pickin from the Nightly channel to Aurora, Beta or even Release ahead of Nightly as a whole becoming the new Aurora, etc.)
- bzbarsky 10y agoThat's not the same thing. "uplift" for that page means "backport from development trunk to a more-stable branch".
- btown 10y agoTheoretically Tor Browser's fork is just another development branch of Firefox, just like Mozilla's primary development branch, and they are "uplifting/backporting" individual patches into stable the same way Mozilla might backport crucial dev-branch improvements/bugfixes into stable.
- jgraham 10y agoBut they aren't landing patches on "stable", but on the upstream development branch (i.e. mozilla-inbound/central). Since it seems more reasonable to view tor browser as a release branch of firefox than as a development branch, it seems like they are using "uplift" in the opposite sense to the normal Mozilla usage i.e. they are taking a patch from a product branch and moving it to a development branch. In that context "upstream" might indeed be a less confusing choice of words. On the other hand I think it's clear what they actually mean here, so probably not worth worry about too much.
- kebolio 10y ago"uplift" in this context seemed to mean to me that they were not upstreaming the patches verbatim but neutering them for Firefox.
- bifurcation 10y agoIt's a mix. Some patches are just getting rebased and landed. For others, the Firefox and Tor Browser teams are working together to re-implement the feature in a way that makes more sense in the broader Firefox architecture. For example, for First Party Isolation, we took the "origin attributes" feature that we built to support containers (user-specified tracking limitations) and reused it for isolation. In the containers case, origins get tagged with a user-specified label; with First Party Isolation, they get tagged with the top-level origin. And to be clear, there's no "neutering" going on here. We're adding the full features that Tor Browser has, since the whole point of this exercise is to let Tor Browser user preference changes instead of patches. That means that the full capability of the Tor Browser features are in Firefox if users want to enable them.
- c0nducktr 10y agoRegarding your last sentence, does that mean that in the future I could open a link in a 'tor browser' container? That's awesome if so.
- BuuQu9hu 10y agoAnd will the default for 'Private Browsing' be a Tor container?
- fbender 10y agoSpeaking as someone who is familiar with some parts of the Firefox architecture or concepts thereof, but not the source code itself: If you were to implement per-container pref overrides, theoretically yes. AFAIK, prefs are global right now. I don't know if it's feasible to implement this in Fx or if that will leak through to the chrome (process). But it's an interesting idea! Would you mind filing a bug at bugzilla.mozilla.org?
- noja 10y agoI'd like to see the canvas fingerprinting dealt with in Firefox mainline, it's used everywhere.
- HappyTypist 10y agoHow do you fix it without disabling canvas?
- csulok 10y agoI don't think it can be solved without origin specific permissions - to allow using local fonts and whatnot used on the canvas, at the same time I don't think that would be an issue.
- gsnedders 10y agoYou don't even need canvas to do font-sniffing. It gets better with canvas, but it's largely good-enough without.
- sintaxi 10y agowhy don't browsers just ship with its own fonts?
- Drdrdrq 10y agoThey used to, loooong time ago... At least I think so? I seem to remember Netscape on Linux bundling the fonts, not sure what they did with Arial/Helvetica on Windows 3.1. However good fonts are a massive undertaking and only make sense for OS vendors, at least the fonts which include many languages.
- kibwen 10y agoFew (none?) of the ancient "web-safe fonts" are permissively licensed. And nice-looking fonts that look good on all OSes and that have a large set of glyph coverage are quite expensive to make (though I'm sure Google/Microsoft/Apple could afford it).
- rahrahrah 10y agoI wonder how first party isolation will deal with both serving stuff from CDNs and serving stuff from different domain names which actually below to the same owner. For example, YouTube streaming data is served from googlevideo.com, most Reddit media is served from redditmedia.com, etc
- cupantae 10y agoI'm getting HTTPS errors on two platforms (and two internet connections) for this website. It seems fairly ironic, but I guess it's just me. Am I doing something wrong? IIDRN says it's up: http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/torproject.org.html http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/torproject.org.html
- icebraining 10y agoSeems fine: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blog.torproject.org&s=138.201.14.196 https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blog.torproje...
- tlack 10y agoI hate to be that guy but considering the subject of the site.. perhaps tampering? Might be worth collecting some info to understand the problem.
- cupantae 10y agoYeah, it's just me. Didn't work on wifi at work or 4G, but does at home. Maybe they're lagging behind a CA update....
- swiley 10y agoWhy use firefox at all? why not something based on libcurl that absolutely does not talk back to the server after reciving the document unless the user clicks on a link or submits a form?
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoWriting a web browser is non-trivial.
- j_s 10y agoThere is a middle ground, using electron + per-site customization. HN user megous got a bit of attention when he teased a bit more detail two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226170
- cryptarch 10y agoI wish you good luck doing online banking that way :')
- cobbzilla 10y agothat's the Richard Stallman approach: https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html he has a script that he can poke to download the content and email it to himself. then he reads it with emacs or maybe lynx with no networking enabled.
- tlrobinson 10y agoWhy doesn't Tor browser just automagically run a read-only lightweight Linux VM who's only program is Firefox, and only network connection is proxied through Tor? Seems like that would solve almost every fingerprinting and sandbox escape vulnerability.
- moondev 10y agohttps://github.com/paulczar/docker-torbrowser https://github.com/paulczar/docker-torbrowser
- chimeracoder 10y agoThat shares your X11 session, which is a security nightmare. If you're running an untrusted application, you should absolutely not give it access to your X11 session. (There are other reasons you might want to have a Tor browser running inside a container, but if the main goal is to nullify fingerprinting and sandbox exploits, you're better off just using an actual VM).
- noja 10y agoWayland is less of a security nightmare, how would it work with Wayland?
- orf 10y agoSeems OK until you want to upload a file somewhere.
- tlrobinson 10y agoThat doesn't seem like a particularly hard problem to solve.
- BuuQu9hu 10y agoSee Qubes, Whonix, Tails, Subgraph etc.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tinus_hn 10y agoNote that Google is not only in the browser business but also the fingerprinting business. They want a future where everything is on the web and where they have an acceptable way of seeing everything everyone is doing. Realistically, most users use off the shelf hardware so for every machine there are millions that are specced exactly the same. That's not very useful for fingerprinting. It would be a good idea though to stop adding more discriminating features to browsers but as you imagine, that is not the direction Google wants to go to. For every fingerprinting trick there is an obfuscation trick though. People just need to keep checking the fingerprinting scripts. A great advantage of the web is that you can in fact see the source code. Also, we expect publishers to embrace the post-ad world. Why would it be easy to block ads so much they stop being viable, but impossible to stop fingerprinting?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]