3 ms·
>A more high-performance, bare metal implementation of the web would most likely give more stuff for websites to fingerprint you with. You want WASM, but WASM m
by meowface 7y ago
>A more high-performance, bare metal implementation of the web would most likely give more stuff for websites to fingerprint you with. You want WASM, but WASM makes the web just as bad as apps in that respect. WASM is going to make it impossible to hide ads (because it will be painted without the DOM) or to block tracking or otherwise malicious code (because it will be heavily obfuscated).
This is true, but what's the alternative? That just seems like a necessary trade-off. Native code will always be easier to obfuscate. It seems backwards to think that we should keep things far more inefficient and consume more cycles and electricity and place things behind more layers of indirection and make web use slower for users just so that it's harder to hide malware. This reminds me of the argument that we shouldn't make cryptography too strong because then it could be used by criminals in a way that even intelligence and law enforcement agencies can't pierce.
There's already a ton of tracking going on, and typically already with heavy obfuscation. The obfuscation doesn't seem to make a difference in terms of practical solutions either way, since the detection and blocking is generally based on origins and IP addresses rather than static (or even dynamic) analysis. And a lot of ad blocking does the same, and should still work for WASM.
For cases where the ads are served directly by the origin and are painted without a DOM, more clever mitigations will be needed, but I don't doubt that people will come up with solutions.
So, yes, the cat-and-mouse game is going to become easier for ad/tracking companies and harder for anti-ad/tracking developers, but it's going to be a big challenge for both parties, just like it is now, and the anti-ad/tracking side is still going to have a lot of success.