web browsers...
Oh, I see that now. Can't please everyone I guess.
Just a followup - here's a good video on how the new Brave anti-fingerprinting works: https://invidiou.site/watch?v=dsu9b5FqK_0
After this video was made, it appears that Brave has changed the anti-fingerprinting behavior to generate a new fingerprint every time you open a new tab, making it even more effective. This type of anti-fingerprinting plus using a VPN, plus turning off geo-location - SHOULD make a user a sort of a "ghost" online. A user must never sign into Google or Facebook (or similar) with the browser, and I clear cookies at every browser restart in order to break that circuit.
This is good enough that I think it's time I look into Brave's code and see where any non-free problems lie. Brave claims to be 100% "open source", have to put it to the test. If there are no source code problems, it would be hard to argue against using this browser for my every day web surfing.
Interesting. I ran into a similar problem while trying to figure out how to efficiently spoof my user agent. Not only was some info (about my OS) available through JS but it would contradict the spoofed UserAgent string, making it even easier to track me. Some unavoidable websites simply would not work without JS so I had to be extra careful and to remember to re-enable JS blocking after each visit to any of these websites. NoScript has made that job way easier.
Here also, the real trick is less about spoofing your data and more about not making it too obvious. I am sure we are still leaking like a bunch of slimy snails in a colander, which is still fine as long as one keeps steering away from all these dirty slime licking websites. I guess it is the combination of complementary measures which determines the actual level of tracking intensity.
Now I need to check whether my sound level is sent over the web. Sometimes switching on or off the tiniest button will create the tracking loophole, although in general* I would trust Abrowser to prevent it from happening by default. It is our job to make sure we are using the proper settings.
*by the way, is "as a rule" a proper replacement for "in general", or is that meaning valid in some places only?
> *by the way, is "as a rule" a proper replacement for "in general", or is that meaning valid in some places only?
I think that when you use "as a rule" in that way, you are really using a shortened form of "as a general rule", which would seem to be equivalent to "in general". Might be better to just use "as a general rule" instead of "as a rule" to leave no doubt in your reader's mind.
> Now I need to check whether my sound level is sent over the web. Sometimes switching on or off the tiniest button will create the tracking loophole
I think these fingerprint spoofing add-ons should work with abrowser (I'm a fan of them when I use firefox or ungoogled-chromium):
audio: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/audioctx-fingerprint-defender/
webgl: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webgl-fingerprint-defender/
font: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/font-fingerprint-defender/
canvas: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/canvas-fingerprint-defender/
They are all mpl 2.0 licensed, and seem to get updated often enough.
> fingerprint spoofing add-ons
Great, thanks. I also found this very detailed and helpful thread of yours, which I either missed or possibly found too long to dive into at the time:
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/experiment-how-i-try-defeat-fingerprinting-abrowser
> when you use "as a rule" in that way, you are really using a shortened form of "as a general rule"
I see, thank you for the explanation. I had taken to use "in general" instead but I thought that "as a rule" added a notion of predictability. I think I'll now go for "usually", as a general rule.
Generally, I usually set a general rule for myself of avoiding generalizations.
I am a member!
Speaking of web browsers, but otherwise off-topic: Can I use Abrowser with something like Devuan or Parabola? Parabola's default repository doesn't seem to include an "abrowser" package, but it should be trivial to add Trisquel's repository in Parabola's package manager and then install Abrowser from there, right? But not with more exotic distros like a future Hyperbola GNU/BSD, I assume?
And I almost started a thread about a Trisquel 9 Mini live system failing to fetch the Abrowser package, but then I realized I had been using an outdated (August 2020) pre-release, so I guess I should try again using the proper release first. (The reason I want to install Abrowser was that I haven't found out how to grant Midori access to the microphone and camera for a Jitsi meeting, and I'm much more familiar with Abrowser than Midori and like it better. Midori doesn't even say what its shield button does.)
abrowser is available through AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0&SeB=nd&K=abrowser&outdated=&SB=n&SO=a&PP=50&do_Search=Go
I haven't used Parabola in awhile and can't recall if it allows you to enable AUR or not. Probably not, since there's tons of non-free stuff in the AUR.
AUR isn't something you have to enable. It's just a site for distributing PKGBUILDs. You either "git clone" the build files or download a tarball, and then use "makepkg" to compile the package. To make Debian analogy, it would be like a site for distributing debianized source packages which users can download and compile with "dpkg-buildpackage". There's no reason it wouldn't work on Parabola. AUR also sometimes works on Hyperbola, but only if the package in question does not have any dependencies which are missing or too old in Hyperbola. In this case, Hyperbola is missing Rust, which is a build dependency for Abrowser.
Yes, yes, you are right of course. I'm too much in the Debian mode of thinking and was thinking of AUR as a repo.
> Can I use Abrowser with something like Devuan or Parabola?
On Devuan, you could try installing the Abrowser .deb and see if that works. If you run into dependency issues then you'll need to compile it from source.
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/abrowser-source#comment-151442
Parabola has Iceweasel, which I think is basically the same thing as Abrowser (a rebranded Firefox with FSDG issues fixed). There is also an AUR package for Abrowser, as Andy points out.
> but it should be trivial to add Trisquel's repository in Parabola's package manager and then install Abrowser from there, right?
No, that wont work. Parabola uses pacman as its package manager, whereas Trisquel uses apt. The packaging and repository formats for these package managers are not compatible.
It did install and run on Devuan for me. I downloaded and installed this file: https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/trisquel/packages/pool/main/f/firefox/abrowser_84.0%2Bbuild3-0ubuntu0.18.04.1%2B9.0trisquel76_amd64.deb
Parabola's default repository doesn't seem to include an "abrowser" package, but it should be trivial to add Trisquel's repository in Parabola's package manager and then install Abrowser from there, right? But not with more exotic distros like a future Hyperbola GNU/BSD, I assume?
It is not possible with either: their package manager is pacman, not APT.
I almost started a thread about a Trisquel 9 Mini live system failing to fetch the Abrowser package, but then I realized I had been using an outdated (August 2020) pre-release, so I guess I should try again using the proper release first.
It should work: please give the error message in the new thread.
I was ready to embark into creating an alternative to the web but we seem to have lost our project leader because some crackpots decided to show up and steer nonsense.
I will get a closer look at that Gemini thing and see what I can get from it: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
Do you use gopher, lutes?
In the end, I think abrowser is still the best browser. It's kept up to date, has most of the default privacy and security settings that I like, comes with duckduckgo non-js version as a search option, and it runs on pretty much all Debian based and Arch based distros. And I can install all my privacy and security add-ons. Pretty hard to beat.
Excellent review of LibreWolf today by Mental Outlaw. Here's a link on my new favorite invidious instance, yewtu.be - https://yewtu.be/watch?v=L2otiFy4ADI
I didn't realize the LibreWolf devs were putting so much work into privacy and defeating fingerprinting.
For now, I'm still getting the most mileage and best performance from abrowser of all the ones I've tried recently. Apparently a .deb version of LibreWolf is in the works, once it's available this will be a pretty strong contender along with abrowser.