8 ms·

Privacy Badger

231 points by sbt 12y ago

PeterWhittaker 12y ago
tl;dr: A browser add-on that blocks privacy invasive behaviour, not necessarily ads. Some ads are permitted, others are blocked. Currently in alpha, blocking only third-party objectionable behaviour; first-party blocking on the roadmap. Cool. I shall install this forthwith.
- dang 12y ago
  All: please don't use "tl;dr" on Hacker News. It's fine, of course, to point out relevant details from an article. But it should be part of a considered comment of your own. HN values intellectual substance. Good reading, writing, and thinking take time. If we're to have high-quality discussion, we need to inhibit the reflex to snap judgment and give the slower and quieter reflective process a chance to function. Since memes like "tl;dr" are emblems of that shallow reflex, we should heed the broken windows theory and not have them here. (Not picking on any individual here; PeterWhittaker's comment is fine without the "tl;dr". The concern is the symbol—symbols matter.)
  - prg318 12y ago
    Tldr: this guy doesn't like when people use tldr Edit: oops didn't see he was a mod now his post makes more sense
    - nightpool 12y ago
      More specifically: The guy that's currently running and in charge of Hacker News doesn't like tl;dr.
  - afternooner 12y ago
    I wholeheartedly disagree. Much of the content on HN is long form journalism, some is content that is so specifically specialized in a field, that only those with thesis in that field will understand. Part of the brilliance of conversation on the web is interactions between disparate fields. On may articles, if I have to read all the way through a theoretical physics post and understand it without a synopsis, I wouldn't be able to add any value to the conversation, and the thread becomes an echo chamber. The initialism tl;dr does matter, because it's a clean and easy way to identify the content that someone looking for a synopsis will look for. I understand the goal. HN doesn't want to become reddit, and values engaged discussion. But tl;dr isn't reddit, and it isn't going away. Language is ever evolving, and the way we talk today would have sent my granddad into a tizzy. Part of being a platform, and HN is a platform for ideas and conversations, is that the people will decide how to manage that relationship. Moderation can only trim the edges, and remove the bad actors, but the tonne and tools will not be set by moderation, but rather cultivation by the users.
    - dang 12y ago
      I agree with you about specialized content, but this has nothing to do with "tl;dr". The best HN threads are already great at giving context and making clear what a story is about. (That's usually how I learn what stories are about.) And yes, no one has time to read every specialized paper or the expertise to understand all of them. That's why we often prefer a high-quality popular article, when one exists, to specialized literature. Original papers typically get linked to in the comments anyway, for those who want them. All of this is good and necessary. But none of it requires "tl;dr". "Tl;dr" is an equivalent in comments to the linkbait gimmicks that we edit out of titles, and it should be kept out of HN comments for the same reason. We're not asking you to make the effort of reading every article or understanding every specialty, just the effort of looking at an HN thread for its content, without gimmickry.
      - Omniusaspirer 12y ago
        I very much question the value of a comment from someone who is incapable of understanding the source material linked in the submission in the first place. If it's so technical you need somebody elses slimmed down (and likely faulty) synopsis to even comprehend it how likely is it that your comment truly contributes to the discussion?
        afternooner 12y ago
        I would encourage you to re-think this stance. Interdisciplinary conversation is a tremendous tool to approaching hard problems, conversions, and ideas. I've encountered this enough in my life to know it to be very beneficial. We get arrogant when we specialize, often missing simple solutions because we assume that the solution has to be hard because we're very smart, and we haven't effectively solved it yet. I've often had aha moments when someone who didn't understand the problem, framed a question in a way that caused me to reconsider my approach. Besides, jargon, not comprehension, is what keeps many smart people out of conversations that they can definitely add value.
      - afternooner 12y ago
        I don't see the tl;dr as you do, but if that's the perception of most people, then I am in error.
  - PeterWhittaker 12y ago
    tl;dr is a perfectly useful meme, better (IM(NS)HO) than such dry fluff as "abstract", "summary", what-have-you. We all of us value substance and content, of course. (Need I really write that? Really? C'mon man.) But we are all of us limited in our time and attention. I consider tl;dr on HN a form of curation: "Here is a pithy summary as to why you should, perchance, take the time to read TFA." Many is the time I have RTFAd only because of a tl;dr provided by another HNer, headlines being worth less than the paper on which they were never even written. I attempt humbly (who the frak am I kidding?) to return the favour to others. "Please don't"? WTF for? Some memes have utility, anything that enables communication and understanding is good. IM(NS)HO, of course. YMMV. IANAL but I don't see how that's relevant.
    - dang 12y ago
      Of course there can be value in a synopsis. The synposis in your comment was fine. But "tl;dr" doesn't add anything about the topic at hand. What it signals is: "you don't need to read anything else". On HN, readers should be reading for themselves, thinking and deciding this for themselves. We want users to have to work a little. The key is "a little". It's not like it's hard, but it requires engaging one of the slower cognitive gears. That gear shift is annoying if we expect everything to be laid out for us. On HN we try to thwart that expectation. Why? We want fiber—thoughts and comments of substance. It's fashionable to talk about opinionated design. One opinion baked into HN's design is: this should be the kind of site that people who don't want to be reflective find boring. When pg was showing me how to moderate HN he said the front page should be "bookish". You wrote something here that I find fascinating: > We all of us value substance and content, of course. (Need I really write that? Really? C'mon man.) What's fascinating is the "of course". It seems so obvious that it's irritating to have to say it. It's such a cliché that there's even a cliché follow-up: "But we are all of us limited in our time and attention". But, on reflection, it's not true. We mostly value a stimulus-response reward cycle. We value having our preconceptions mirrored back to us. We value the feeling that we understand things (recognition) more than the effort of working through material in order partly to understand it. This is also the dynamic in flamewars, so substance and civility are related. There can't be many of us who are free from this—certainly not me. But HN is an experiment in trying to grapple with this problem on the internet (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). That's what this site is. It may not do it well, and is probably doomed, but the driving idea has always been "maybe we can stave off doom a little longer".
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    A substantial portion of the uses of tl;dr I've seen on HN are summaries of comments, not the article (and the most common, or close to it, is people using tl;dr to provide a short summary of their own in-depth comment.) Its become a widely accepted online shorthand for "or, more succinctly, ...", so "don't use it on HN" is a pretty weird dictate. Yes, the etymology of the shorthand is a abbreviation for "Too long, didn't read", but except when its used alone, that's actually fairly distant from the meaning it has taken on in use.
Karunamon 12y ago
Neat! Adblock blocks ads, Noscript for dodgy scripts, and it looks like this has some overlap with those as well as a cookie handler. That looks like the unholy trinity of tracking systems dealt with.
- canvia 12y ago
  Don't forget BetterPrivacy for removing flash cookies: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy...
Create 12y ago
We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world. This should not actually be a complicated inquiry. http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html
- Create 12y ago
  They are not John Poindexter, they’re trying to sell advertising. But make no mistake about it – they are in the surveillance business; that is how they make money: they surveil people and use that to profit. And so the effect is the same. http://privacy-pc.com/news/changing-threats-to-privacy-moxie-marlinspike-on-privacy-threats-at-defcon-part-2.html http://privacy-pc.com/news/changing-threats-to-privacy-moxie...
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    Call me when someone gets hauled off to Guantanamo because of ad demographics. The lack of nuance here when it comes to "tracking" is insane. I can see wanting to block them for whatever reason, but I can't understand this reduction to the absurd chicken-little behavior when it comes to ad targeting.
    - Create 12y ago
      And lastly, we now know that the ‘Aurora’4 attacks on Google were at least partially about intercept. One thing we’ve learned from those attacks is that the Government is running intercept systems on their networks, and not only that but other ‘eavesdroppers’ are trying to get access to those intercept systems. So what we are seeing is as more and more data accumulates in these places, it becomes more and more valuable. And so ‘eavesdroppers’ move to those places and even ‘eavesdroppers’ without a legal backing also try to move to those places. So I think we are going to continue to see that as a problem as these become more and more valuable over time. http://privacy-pc.com/news/changing-threats-to-privacy-moxie-marlinspike-on-privacy-threats-at-defcon-part-2.html http://privacy-pc.com/news/changing-threats-to-privacy-moxie... So the primary form of collection that should concern us most is media that spy on us while we use them. Books that watch us read them, music that’s listen to us listen to it. Search boxes that report what we are searching for to whoever is searching for us and doesn’t know us yet. There is a lot of talk about data coming out of facebook: is it coming to me? is it coming to him? is it coming to them? They want you to think that the threat is data coming out. You should know that the threat is code going in. For the last 50 years what has been happening in enterprise computing, is the addition of that layer of analytic on top of the datawarehouse that mostly goes in enterprise computing by the name of "business intelligence". what it means is you’ve been building this vast datawarehouses in your company for decade or 2 now you have only information about your own operations your suppliers your competitors, your customers now you want to make that data start to do tricks. By adding it to all the open source data out there in the world, and using it to tell you the answers to questions you didn’t know you had. That’s business intelligence. The real threat of facebook is the BI layer on top of facebook warehouse. The facebook datewarehouse contains the behavior not just the thinking but also the behavior or somewhere nearing a billion people. The business intelligence layer on top of it which is just all that code they get to run covered by the terms of service that say "they can run any code they want for improvement of the experience". The business intelligence on top of facebook is where every intelligence service of the world wants to go. Imagine that you are a tiny little secret police organisation in some not very important country. Let’s put ourselves in their position Let’s call them I don’t know what, you know ... "kirghista". You are a secret police you are in the "people business" secret policing is "people business". You have classes of people that you want you want agents, you want sources you have adversaries, and you have influencables, that is people you torture who are related to adversaries wives, husbands, fathers, daughter you know those people. So you are looking for classes of people. You don’t know their names, but you know what they are like you know who is recrutable for you as an agent you know who are likely sources, you can give the social characteristics of your adversaries, and once you know your adversaries, you can find the influencables. So what you want to do is run code inside facebook. It will help you find the people that you want it will show you the people whose behavior and whose social circles tell you that they are what you want by way of agent, sources what their adversaries are and who you can torture to get to them. So you don’t want data out of facebook the day you have data out of facebook it is dead. You want to put code into facebook and run it there and get the results you want to cooperate. http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-thought-requires-free-media http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-t...
natch 12y ago
Nice. Some feedback: The "first run" page doesn't tell me clearly that anything has been installed or has started working. This kind of information should be really clear and prominent, the largest thing on the page. Instead it's not even there at all, as far as I can see. Edit: Please don't reply and say "you can check if it's working by blah blah blah." That is missing the point. My point is that EFF should fix the extension to make this communication clear for ALL users.
- Haywain 12y ago
  I thought the same thing — also, that it discusses "red", "yellow", and "green" states of the plugin. I looked up at the Firefox Toolbar and noticed it was, indeed, "red". So I figured, OK, it must have detected some sort of tracker on this page... Yet! The color of the icon in the toolbar is not indicative of this, as far as I can tell. The colors actually refer to the little slider that appears once you click the icon. I believe they should consider making the icon a neutral color, or change color depending on the "cleanliness" of a site's trackers. Not sure if the latter is possible, however. In any case, I'm very much excited to see something like this from EFF.
- mister_m 12y ago
  Add an issue on the github project if you please!
frncscgmz 12y ago
Kinda off-topic but, am I the only one who thought that background was moving? Had to blink a couple of times to get used to.
- tcfunk 12y ago
  Yeah for me there is sort of an illusion going on where the hexagonal patterns that I'm not looking at directly seem to be growing...kind trippy.
- iamtew 12y ago
  It was the first thing I noticed indeed. I was thinking it was some animations on the website first. Very similar to the example gallery on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_illusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_illusion
gyosko 12y ago
Shall I remove ADB and ghostery and just go with Privacy Badger?
- vsviridov 12y ago
  No, i tried that and it's not at the state to provide adequate replacement. But I have high hopes.
  - gyosko 12y ago
    Thanks. I was thinking the same,but wanted to hear other opinions.
- vsviridov 12y ago
  Also, Disconnect extension is a non-proprietary alternative to Ghostery. https://prism-break.org/en/subcategories/windows-web-browser-addons/ https://prism-break.org/en/subcategories/windows-web-browser...
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  I don't know about ADB, but I find the Privacy Badger a little easier to use and understand than something like Ghostery. I think it's also a little easier to unblock stuff when something isn't working because of it.
pxndx 12y ago
I disabled third party cookies in Chrome. Doesn't this basically do the same?
- EduardoBautista 12y ago
  They can still collect data from you, just not persist anything through cookies.
- driverdan 12y ago
  Nope. That's a good first step but here are many ways to track you outside of 3rd party cookies. Google Analytics, for example, uses 1st party cookies.
  - psykovsky 12y ago
    and that's why I have the following in my hosts file, together with thousands more. 127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com www.google-analytics.com I find it doesn't slow down browsers as much as adblock and similar extensions.
    - nacs 12y ago
      The host based approach won't block as well as Adblock (Edge/Plus) however as those plugins can block ads at the DOM element level. There are many sites that host/proxy their ads on their own domain name but AB can block the <divs> and such by name or by other properties like size.
atmosx 12y ago
I wonder, is there any page worth visiting, where the icon does actually turn green?!
- fyrabanks 12y ago
  I don't think the color coding system is working quite right. It's red on eff.org...
- pix64 12y ago
  The icon doesn't change color. Click on the icon. Each third party domain has its own slider which is colored.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Gracana 12y ago
Speaking of privacy badgering... Why won't firefox let me create a security exception to view this page? Without a way to jump through that hoop, I can't even view the page.
- handsomeransoms 12y ago
  (Firefox dev here) When you say Security Exception, do you mean you're seeing a certificate error on this page? The certificate is valid for me, so that indicates something dodgy on your end (perhaps a captive portal, or middlebox on a corporate network).
  - Gracana 12y ago
    I'm behind a simple NAT, but that's never caused trouble before. Other self-signed certs work fine, but this one doesn't give me the "I understand the risks" option. Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/NTLY7ZB.png http://i.imgur.com/NTLY7ZB.png You're saying it's completely valid though? Bizarre.
    - driverdan 12y ago
      Have you modified your trusted issuer certs? EFF's cert was issued by "StartCom Class 2 Primary Intermediate Server CA"
      - Gracana 12y ago
        Oh, you know what? I think I have. IIRC there was news about a cert issuing entity charging to remove insecure certs, so I removed it from my trusted list. I'm sure that's what has caused this issue for me.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - Hello71 12y ago
      if you've modified your roots or are behind invasive proxies and the site uses STS or iframes then exceptions won't be offered.
baumbart 12y ago
Could maybe someone explain to me: What exactly is wrong with Adblock Edge + Ghostery? If not, why do they make another similar extension then? There is no actual manual configuration needed, they don't use me for their business model (or none of that I know).
- UVB-76 12y ago
  > Although we like Disconnect, Adblock Plus, Ghostery and similar products (in fact Privacy Badger is based on the ABP code!), none of them are exactly what we were looking for. In our testing, all of them required some custom configuration to block non-consensual trackers. Several of these extensions have business models that we weren't entirely comfortable with.
jordanlev 12y ago
I'm curious if the functionality is only enabled if I have the "Tell sites that I do not want to be tracked" setting turned on in my browser preferences? There is nothing explicitly said about this in the FAQ's, but there are references to the purpose of this being "so sites will honor the Do Not Track feature", so it seems to be implying that it only does its thing if I have "Do Not Track" enabled? Thanks!
- akavel 12y ago
  Both in Chromium and Firefox, after installation, an embedded "firstRun.html" page is shown, which includes the following statement: [...] We send the Do Not Track header with each request, and our extension evaluates the likelihood that you are still being tracked. [...] [Still, I didn't attempt to verify this in code or by sniffing packets.] I, on the other hand, would be very interested to know if it is expected to work OK with NoScript (and NoScript with it)? [edit] From https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox/issues/73 https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox/issues/73 and https://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/463750477075578880 https://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/463750477075578880 I assume it is compatible with NoScript.
click170 12y ago
First place I went to was "I am an online advertising / tracking company. How do I stop Privacy Badger from blocking me?". If all it takes is MaliciousCompany.com from posting some text document in the right spot to get PrivacyBadget to whitelist the page, how is this any better than DNT? Do they have a way of blacklisting domains that abuse this? Edit: Also, I LOVE the idea behind this and installed it immediately to compliment ABP and Ghostery.
- synchronise 12y ago
  Firstly, isn't this designed to completely replace Ghostery? Secondly, doesn't Ghostery have privacy issues by sending your browsing history to a 3rd party?
  - pyroh 12y ago
    It's optional, off by default, and is anonymized (apparently).
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ashmud 12y ago
"[...] in Firefox, Privacy Badger will be automatically deactivated when you enter Private Browsing Mode [...]". This is kind of a deal breaker for me. I frequently use Private Browsing to quickly open a single browser window without waiting for all my session windows/tabs to open.
reedlaw 12y ago
After reading about AdBlock Plus's effect on memory usage in Firefox[1] I immediately disabled it. Seeing that this is also based on the ABP codebase, I wonder if it will run into the same issue. 1. https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-pluss-effect-on-firefoxs-memory-usage/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus...
- papaf 12y ago
  Have you tried AdBlock edge? Its much faster. I have no idea if this is because it is using less memory though.
donniezazen 12y ago
I haven't made up my mind if tracking is altogether bad. I certainly enjoy Google showing me relevant ads in a non-malware-appearance. Privacy is good in theory but out of convenience I keep using services that compromise my private information and I myself willingly leave personal information online on several websites. Anything is as strong as your weakest link. And their are too many weak links in my online circle.
xyliamaxwell 12y ago
Looks good - I'm going to try it when it's in Beta.

231 points by sbt 12y ago

tl;dr: A browser add-on that blocks privacy invasive behaviour, not necessarily ads. Some ads are permitted, others are blocked. Currently in alpha, blocking only third-party objectionable behaviour; first-party blocking on the roadmap. Cool. I shall install this forthwith.

dang 12y ago
All: please don't use "tl;dr" on Hacker News. It's fine, of course, to point out relevant details from an article. But it should be part of a considered comment of your own. HN values intellectual substance. Good reading, writing, and thinking take time. If we're to have high-quality discussion, we need to inhibit the reflex to snap judgment and give the slower and quieter reflective process a chance to function. Since memes like "tl;dr" are emblems of that shallow reflex, we should heed the broken windows theory and not have them here. (Not picking on any individual here; PeterWhittaker's comment is fine without the "tl;dr". The concern is the symbol—symbols matter.)
- prg318 12y ago
  Tldr: this guy doesn't like when people use tldr Edit: oops didn't see he was a mod now his post makes more sense
  - nightpool 12y ago
    More specifically: The guy that's currently running and in charge of Hacker News doesn't like tl;dr.
- afternooner 12y ago
  I wholeheartedly disagree. Much of the content on HN is long form journalism, some is content that is so specifically specialized in a field, that only those with thesis in that field will understand. Part of the brilliance of conversation on the web is interactions between disparate fields. On may articles, if I have to read all the way through a theoretical physics post and understand it without a synopsis, I wouldn't be able to add any value to the conversation, and the thread becomes an echo chamber. The initialism tl;dr does matter, because it's a clean and easy way to identify the content that someone looking for a synopsis will look for. I understand the goal. HN doesn't want to become reddit, and values engaged discussion. But tl;dr isn't reddit, and it isn't going away. Language is ever evolving, and the way we talk today would have sent my granddad into a tizzy. Part of being a platform, and HN is a platform for ideas and conversations, is that the people will decide how to manage that relationship. Moderation can only trim the edges, and remove the bad actors, but the tonne and tools will not be set by moderation, but rather cultivation by the users.
  - dang 12y ago
    I agree with you about specialized content, but this has nothing to do with "tl;dr". The best HN threads are already great at giving context and making clear what a story is about. (That's usually how I learn what stories are about.) And yes, no one has time to read every specialized paper or the expertise to understand all of them. That's why we often prefer a high-quality popular article, when one exists, to specialized literature. Original papers typically get linked to in the comments anyway, for those who want them. All of this is good and necessary. But none of it requires "tl;dr". "Tl;dr" is an equivalent in comments to the linkbait gimmicks that we edit out of titles, and it should be kept out of HN comments for the same reason. We're not asking you to make the effort of reading every article or understanding every specialty, just the effort of looking at an HN thread for its content, without gimmickry.
    - Omniusaspirer 12y ago
      I very much question the value of a comment from someone who is incapable of understanding the source material linked in the submission in the first place. If it's so technical you need somebody elses slimmed down (and likely faulty) synopsis to even comprehend it how likely is it that your comment truly contributes to the discussion?
      - afternooner 12y ago
        I would encourage you to re-think this stance. Interdisciplinary conversation is a tremendous tool to approaching hard problems, conversions, and ideas. I've encountered this enough in my life to know it to be very beneficial. We get arrogant when we specialize, often missing simple solutions because we assume that the solution has to be hard because we're very smart, and we haven't effectively solved it yet. I've often had aha moments when someone who didn't understand the problem, framed a question in a way that caused me to reconsider my approach. Besides, jargon, not comprehension, is what keeps many smart people out of conversations that they can definitely add value.
    - afternooner 12y ago
      I don't see the tl;dr as you do, but if that's the perception of most people, then I am in error.
- PeterWhittaker 12y ago
  tl;dr is a perfectly useful meme, better (IM(NS)HO) than such dry fluff as "abstract", "summary", what-have-you. We all of us value substance and content, of course. (Need I really write that? Really? C'mon man.) But we are all of us limited in our time and attention. I consider tl;dr on HN a form of curation: "Here is a pithy summary as to why you should, perchance, take the time to read TFA." Many is the time I have RTFAd only because of a tl;dr provided by another HNer, headlines being worth less than the paper on which they were never even written. I attempt humbly (who the frak am I kidding?) to return the favour to others. "Please don't"? WTF for? Some memes have utility, anything that enables communication and understanding is good. IM(NS)HO, of course. YMMV. IANAL but I don't see how that's relevant.
  - dang 12y ago
    Of course there can be value in a synopsis. The synposis in your comment was fine. But "tl;dr" doesn't add anything about the topic at hand. What it signals is: "you don't need to read anything else". On HN, readers should be reading for themselves, thinking and deciding this for themselves. We want users to have to work a little. The key is "a little". It's not like it's hard, but it requires engaging one of the slower cognitive gears. That gear shift is annoying if we expect everything to be laid out for us. On HN we try to thwart that expectation. Why? We want fiber—thoughts and comments of substance. It's fashionable to talk about opinionated design. One opinion baked into HN's design is: this should be the kind of site that people who don't want to be reflective find boring. When pg was showing me how to moderate HN he said the front page should be "bookish". You wrote something here that I find fascinating: > We all of us value substance and content, of course. (Need I really write that? Really? C'mon man.) What's fascinating is the "of course". It seems so obvious that it's irritating to have to say it. It's such a cliché that there's even a cliché follow-up: "But we are all of us limited in our time and attention". But, on reflection, it's not true. We mostly value a stimulus-response reward cycle. We value having our preconceptions mirrored back to us. We value the feeling that we understand things (recognition) more than the effort of working through material in order partly to understand it. This is also the dynamic in flamewars, so substance and civility are related. There can't be many of us who are free from this—certainly not me. But HN is an experiment in trying to grapple with this problem on the internet (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). That's what this site is. It may not do it well, and is probably doomed, but the driving idea has always been "maybe we can stave off doom a little longer".
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  A substantial portion of the uses of tl;dr I've seen on HN are summaries of comments, not the article (and the most common, or close to it, is people using tl;dr to provide a short summary of their own in-depth comment.) Its become a widely accepted online shorthand for "or, more succinctly, ...", so "don't use it on HN" is a pretty weird dictate. Yes, the etymology of the shorthand is a abbreviation for "Too long, didn't read", but except when its used alone, that's actually fairly distant from the meaning it has taken on in use.

Karunamon 12y ago

Neat! Adblock blocks ads, Noscript for dodgy scripts, and it looks like this has some overlap with those as well as a cookie handler. That looks like the unholy trinity of tracking systems dealt with.

canvia 12y ago
Don't forget BetterPrivacy for removing flash cookies: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy...

Create 12y ago

We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world. This should not actually be a complicated inquiry. http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html

Create 12y ago
They are not John Poindexter, they’re trying to sell advertising. But make no mistake about it – they are in the surveillance business; that is how they make money: they surveil people and use that to profit. And so the effect is the same. http://privacy-pc.com/news/changing-threats-to-privacy-moxie-marlinspike-on-privacy-threats-at-defcon-part-2.html http://privacy-pc.com/news/changing-threats-to-privacy-moxie...
- Karunamon 12y ago
  Call me when someone gets hauled off to Guantanamo because of ad demographics. The lack of nuance here when it comes to "tracking" is insane. I can see wanting to block them for whatever reason, but I can't understand this reduction to the absurd chicken-little behavior when it comes to ad targeting.
  - Create 12y ago
    And lastly, we now know that the ‘Aurora’4 attacks on Google were at least partially about intercept. One thing we’ve learned from those attacks is that the Government is running intercept systems on their networks, and not only that but other ‘eavesdroppers’ are trying to get access to those intercept systems. So what we are seeing is as more and more data accumulates in these places, it becomes more and more valuable. And so ‘eavesdroppers’ move to those places and even ‘eavesdroppers’ without a legal backing also try to move to those places. So I think we are going to continue to see that as a problem as these become more and more valuable over time. http://privacy-pc.com/news/changing-threats-to-privacy-moxie-marlinspike-on-privacy-threats-at-defcon-part-2.html http://privacy-pc.com/news/changing-threats-to-privacy-moxie... So the primary form of collection that should concern us most is media that spy on us while we use them. Books that watch us read them, music that’s listen to us listen to it. Search boxes that report what we are searching for to whoever is searching for us and doesn’t know us yet. There is a lot of talk about data coming out of facebook: is it coming to me? is it coming to him? is it coming to them? They want you to think that the threat is data coming out. You should know that the threat is code going in. For the last 50 years what has been happening in enterprise computing, is the addition of that layer of analytic on top of the datawarehouse that mostly goes in enterprise computing by the name of "business intelligence". what it means is you’ve been building this vast datawarehouses in your company for decade or 2 now you have only information about your own operations your suppliers your competitors, your customers now you want to make that data start to do tricks. By adding it to all the open source data out there in the world, and using it to tell you the answers to questions you didn’t know you had. That’s business intelligence. The real threat of facebook is the BI layer on top of facebook warehouse. The facebook datewarehouse contains the behavior not just the thinking but also the behavior or somewhere nearing a billion people. The business intelligence layer on top of it which is just all that code they get to run covered by the terms of service that say "they can run any code they want for improvement of the experience". The business intelligence on top of facebook is where every intelligence service of the world wants to go. Imagine that you are a tiny little secret police organisation in some not very important country. Let’s put ourselves in their position Let’s call them I don’t know what, you know ... "kirghista". You are a secret police you are in the "people business" secret policing is "people business". You have classes of people that you want you want agents, you want sources you have adversaries, and you have influencables, that is people you torture who are related to adversaries wives, husbands, fathers, daughter you know those people. So you are looking for classes of people. You don’t know their names, but you know what they are like you know who is recrutable for you as an agent you know who are likely sources, you can give the social characteristics of your adversaries, and once you know your adversaries, you can find the influencables. So what you want to do is run code inside facebook. It will help you find the people that you want it will show you the people whose behavior and whose social circles tell you that they are what you want by way of agent, sources what their adversaries are and who you can torture to get to them. So you don’t want data out of facebook the day you have data out of facebook it is dead. You want to put code into facebook and run it there and get the results you want to cooperate. http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-thought-requires-free-media http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-t...

natch 12y ago

Nice. Some feedback: The "first run" page doesn't tell me clearly that anything has been installed or has started working. This kind of information should be really clear and prominent, the largest thing on the page. Instead it's not even there at all, as far as I can see. Edit: Please don't reply and say "you can check if it's working by blah blah blah." That is missing the point. My point is that EFF should fix the extension to make this communication clear for ALL users.

Haywain 12y ago
I thought the same thing — also, that it discusses "red", "yellow", and "green" states of the plugin. I looked up at the Firefox Toolbar and noticed it was, indeed, "red". So I figured, OK, it must have detected some sort of tracker on this page... Yet! The color of the icon in the toolbar is not indicative of this, as far as I can tell. The colors actually refer to the little slider that appears once you click the icon. I believe they should consider making the icon a neutral color, or change color depending on the "cleanliness" of a site's trackers. Not sure if the latter is possible, however. In any case, I'm very much excited to see something like this from EFF.
mister_m 12y ago
Add an issue on the github project if you please!

frncscgmz 12y ago

Kinda off-topic but, am I the only one who thought that background was moving? Had to blink a couple of times to get used to.

tcfunk 12y ago
Yeah for me there is sort of an illusion going on where the hexagonal patterns that I'm not looking at directly seem to be growing...kind trippy.
iamtew 12y ago
It was the first thing I noticed indeed. I was thinking it was some animations on the website first. Very similar to the example gallery on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_illusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_illusion

gyosko 12y ago

Shall I remove ADB and ghostery and just go with Privacy Badger?

vsviridov 12y ago
No, i tried that and it's not at the state to provide adequate replacement. But I have high hopes.
- gyosko 12y ago
  Thanks. I was thinking the same,but wanted to hear other opinions.
vsviridov 12y ago
Also, Disconnect extension is a non-proprietary alternative to Ghostery. https://prism-break.org/en/subcategories/windows-web-browser-addons/ https://prism-break.org/en/subcategories/windows-web-browser...
higherpurpose 12y ago
I don't know about ADB, but I find the Privacy Badger a little easier to use and understand than something like Ghostery. I think it's also a little easier to unblock stuff when something isn't working because of it.

pxndx 12y ago

I disabled third party cookies in Chrome. Doesn't this basically do the same?

EduardoBautista 12y ago
They can still collect data from you, just not persist anything through cookies.
driverdan 12y ago
Nope. That's a good first step but here are many ways to track you outside of 3rd party cookies. Google Analytics, for example, uses 1st party cookies.
- psykovsky 12y ago
  and that's why I have the following in my hosts file, together with thousands more. 127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com www.google-analytics.com I find it doesn't slow down browsers as much as adblock and similar extensions.
  - nacs 12y ago
    The host based approach won't block as well as Adblock (Edge/Plus) however as those plugins can block ads at the DOM element level. There are many sites that host/proxy their ads on their own domain name but AB can block the <divs> and such by name or by other properties like size.

atmosx 12y ago

I wonder, is there any page worth visiting, where the icon does actually turn green?!

fyrabanks 12y ago
I don't think the color coding system is working quite right. It's red on eff.org...
pix64 12y ago
The icon doesn't change color. Click on the icon. Each third party domain has its own slider which is colored.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Gracana 12y ago

Speaking of privacy badgering... Why won't firefox let me create a security exception to view this page? Without a way to jump through that hoop, I can't even view the page.

handsomeransoms 12y ago
(Firefox dev here) When you say Security Exception, do you mean you're seeing a certificate error on this page? The certificate is valid for me, so that indicates something dodgy on your end (perhaps a captive portal, or middlebox on a corporate network).
- Gracana 12y ago
  I'm behind a simple NAT, but that's never caused trouble before. Other self-signed certs work fine, but this one doesn't give me the "I understand the risks" option. Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/NTLY7ZB.png http://i.imgur.com/NTLY7ZB.png You're saying it's completely valid though? Bizarre.
  - driverdan 12y ago
    Have you modified your trusted issuer certs? EFF's cert was issued by "StartCom Class 2 Primary Intermediate Server CA"
    - Gracana 12y ago
      Oh, you know what? I think I have. IIRC there was news about a cert issuing entity charging to remove insecure certs, so I removed it from my trusted list. I'm sure that's what has caused this issue for me.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - Hello71 12y ago
    if you've modified your roots or are behind invasive proxies and the site uses STS or iframes then exceptions won't be offered.

baumbart 12y ago

Could maybe someone explain to me: What exactly is wrong with Adblock Edge + Ghostery? If not, why do they make another similar extension then? There is no actual manual configuration needed, they don't use me for their business model (or none of that I know).

UVB-76 12y ago
> Although we like Disconnect, Adblock Plus, Ghostery and similar products (in fact Privacy Badger is based on the ABP code!), none of them are exactly what we were looking for. In our testing, all of them required some custom configuration to block non-consensual trackers. Several of these extensions have business models that we weren't entirely comfortable with.

jordanlev 12y ago

I'm curious if the functionality is only enabled if I have the "Tell sites that I do not want to be tracked" setting turned on in my browser preferences? There is nothing explicitly said about this in the FAQ's, but there are references to the purpose of this being "so sites will honor the Do Not Track feature", so it seems to be implying that it only does its thing if I have "Do Not Track" enabled? Thanks!

akavel 12y ago
Both in Chromium and Firefox, after installation, an embedded "firstRun.html" page is shown, which includes the following statement: [...] We send the Do Not Track header with each request, and our extension evaluates the likelihood that you are still being tracked. [...] [Still, I didn't attempt to verify this in code or by sniffing packets.] I, on the other hand, would be very interested to know if it is expected to work OK with NoScript (and NoScript with it)? [edit] From https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox/issues/73 https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox/issues/73 and https://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/463750477075578880 https://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/463750477075578880 I assume it is compatible with NoScript.

click170 12y ago

First place I went to was "I am an online advertising / tracking company. How do I stop Privacy Badger from blocking me?". If all it takes is MaliciousCompany.com from posting some text document in the right spot to get PrivacyBadget to whitelist the page, how is this any better than DNT? Do they have a way of blacklisting domains that abuse this? Edit: Also, I LOVE the idea behind this and installed it immediately to compliment ABP and Ghostery.

synchronise 12y ago
Firstly, isn't this designed to completely replace Ghostery? Secondly, doesn't Ghostery have privacy issues by sending your browsing history to a 3rd party?
- pyroh 12y ago
  It's optional, off by default, and is anonymized (apparently).

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ashmud 12y ago

"[...] in Firefox, Privacy Badger will be automatically deactivated when you enter Private Browsing Mode [...]". This is kind of a deal breaker for me. I frequently use Private Browsing to quickly open a single browser window without waiting for all my session windows/tabs to open.

reedlaw 12y ago

After reading about AdBlock Plus's effect on memory usage in Firefox[1] I immediately disabled it. Seeing that this is also based on the ABP codebase, I wonder if it will run into the same issue. 1. https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-pluss-effect-on-firefoxs-memory-usage/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus...

papaf 12y ago
Have you tried AdBlock edge? Its much faster. I have no idea if this is because it is using less memory though.

donniezazen 12y ago

I haven't made up my mind if tracking is altogether bad. I certainly enjoy Google showing me relevant ads in a non-malware-appearance. Privacy is good in theory but out of convenience I keep using services that compromise my private information and I myself willingly leave personal information online on several websites. Anything is as strong as your weakest link. And their are too many weak links in my online circle.

xyliamaxwell 12y ago

Looks good - I'm going to try it when it's in Beta.