I tried over and over to reproduce it in the past few days (see) but I just couldn’t…
other than websites that return a score I argue that websites that return values are not of much value if you do not know how much entropy they carry (eg. are they the same for all the people on the same OS?) or how they are handled in the browser with various mitigations. it’s one thing to read a value, but it’s a whole different thing to understand if and how it can be used, leave alone against a specific tool.
everything is documented on TB’s official gitlab btw, people working on it know their stuff.
Firefox has a bigger userbase than Tor Browser users, and it is a pretty uncontested claim logically. Firefox has Tor Project’s code for anti fingerprinting and per site data isolation upstreamed to Firefox’s private browsing mode since the past 15-20 or so versions now.
Firefox does not have the crowd that Tor Browser has, it does not have the Tor network, RFP is not enabled by default and users will make changes to their settings. even if Firefox has the larger user base there’s no argument for Firefox having a better crowd, sadly there’s no linear correlation in this case.
yes, you can harden it, but the crowd is so small that you will not defeat advanced scripts, nor you should expect to. hardened setups are also not equal as projects like arkenfox and librewolf are going to be tweaked by users post hardening (as they very much should).
applying stylometry analysis
this is opsec and it does not strictly apply to the tool you’re using so I don’t think it’s a valid argument for any of the points explained above.
as for the list you wrote:
“TB should cover all metrics” (I know you haven’t said it, I just didn’t know how to phrase it better lol) is not a safe assumption: not all metrics are equal, they do not all carry entropy nor they are all valuable fping methods. this brings us back to the initial part of this comment.
the rest of the stuff you discussed, like typing in the wrong tab etc, is mostly opsec and as I said I also value the added peace of mind, but it doesn’t make logins on Tor bad per-se. keyloggers are also a bit out of scope for this discussion imo.
tldr: TB covers enough metrics for most threat models even with JS on - naive scripts swallow the pill, advanced ones are defeated by the crowd, and don’t forget the network -, and the benefits of disabling JS are not that big.
ps thanks for getting back despite the lengthy comments, I added some edits for completeness on both sides of the discussion :-)
I just ran TBB and used deviceinfo.me to verify
ironic how this is posted below an article that says that testing websites are not reliable and that you should not read into the results unless you understand them. I don’t think this is the case, sorry about being painfully honest but I don’t want people to freak out over tests instead of reading a well written article:
You want to know what a JS enabled Tor Browser looks like? A standard Firefox private mode tab with uBlock Origin medium mode and arkenfox user.js applied.
that’s simply not true. TB has further enhancement and code changes, it is based on ESR plus it’s not the same as a private window at all since private mode does not write to disk for example. most importantly tho: TB has crowd and the Tor network, that’s vital and a huge difference. a traffic analysis would also probably identify Firefox + uBO in medium mode vs TB. also, arkenfox does not try to make Firefox turn into TB, that’s clearly stated in the wiki and I would know as I am a repo admin :-)
Can the author explain me why keeping JS on is so helpful
usability, a browser with JS disabled by default is not a good everyday browser for most. the more people use Tor Browser daily and have a good experience with it, the larger the crowd gets.
All the above information I mentioned is trackable for…
I mean once you are subscribed, why would they want to fingerprint you? they already know who you are. when facebook operates as third party it will be isolated plus on a different circuit and with fingerprinting protection, plus (from arkenfox’s wiki):
if a fingerprinting script should run, it would need to be universal or widespread (i.e it uses the exact same canvas, audio and webgl tests among others - most aren’t), shared by a data broker (most aren’t), not be naive (most are) and not be just first party or used solely for bot detection and fraud prevention (most probably are)
I also don’t get what the difference between typing private stuff on facebook on tor or behind a vpn or on your ISP’s network is. however I must say that I still understand why from a “peace of mind” perspective it makes sense to keep stuff isolated, so as I said above mine is not really a strong opinion here.
sorry about typing a lot, but I figured this was valuable information to share, despite being nothing new.
I will start by saying that the author of the article was a tor researcher and dev so this gives some context on the content and me posting this.
which is a very risky thing to do for someone not familiar
may I ask why? I generally agree with the sentiment of the article but I don’t have a very strong opinion on this and maybe I’m missing something.
PS I don’t think the usual “I will end up in a list of people who use Tor” argument is a valid one.
Preferring JavaScript stay disabled is a better choice, the next best is only allowing JavaScript when needed momentarily.
I disagree with this, it’s simply overkill for 99% of the people with arguably no benefit at all. what’s there to gain?
a great post that was published a few years ago on Matt Traudt’s blog with some tips for people using Tor and the Tor Browser. …
hello, the new release should be out on all platforms. sorry for the delay we had some slowdowns with the settings and then a good portion of our patches needed a rebase. we should have done stuff earlier but personal life got in the way, but well here we are in the end :-) …
opinions are formed from YouTube videos
well I’m not asking that you take my words for it:
I also don’t agree with the above video (and feel free to discuss in here why you also don’t), but don’t question the level of research without first checking.
This makes me question the entire Librewolf project. If opinions are formed based on random YouTube creators, how can we trust any decision made on Librewolf?
I watched the video now, and while I get that the stuff said in it doesn’t make sense I fail to understand what made you assume that we form opinions based on youtube videos. if you want to know how you can trust the decisions check gitlab and see how everything is documented and researched properly.
Btw choosing brave search as a search engine for librewolf is a bad idea because that’ll only lead to people using brave in the long run
I’ll leave the rest to others as I haven’t watched the video nor I followed well enough the discussion between you, @opalraava@lemmy.ml and @Echedenyan@lemmy.ml.
regarding this tho, I wanted to say that we used to have brave in the search engine list, and it was then removed in order to reduce the length of it, and keep only what’s essential. the list is already pretty long as right now, so I don’t think it’s coming back anytime soon, leave alone making it default. IIRC we decided the same day as the news came out that we were going to stick to DDG and just not give a fuck about everything outside of privacy, users can always change to what they like.
I personally would have loved to have searx as default but forcing users to default to a particular instance is a bad move imo. we still include it tho, as the project deserves attention. if we had more people helping maybe we could have setup a librewolf instance of some kind, but it is what is :-)
One usually sees only articles introducing new extensions and prompting to install them, not the other way around.
yup, plus I recognize the average user can easily keep track of how built-in protections and extensions might overlap. nowadays once hardened firefox makes most of them useless, nice to see.
a portion of the arkenfox wiki where a bunch of popular, yet unnecessary, extensions are discussed. make good use of it :-)…
https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community/browser/arch
I think artix does its own builds, in the past they have been a bit slow with updates.
hello :-) as usual the new librewolf release is on its way or already out, depending on your platform. …
hello everyone, new librewolf release on the way or already out, depending on your platform. …
hi everyone! the new release is either out or on the way, and this is a pretty big one for us. …
I’m currently working on re-evaluating our search engine selection (reading privacy policies and all that good stuff), to see what to keep, remove, maybe add. I figured I might use some input from lemmy. …
back again with another major release (and yes I only post for major releases but every minor firefox release equals to a new librewolf release). osx is out, linux and windows are getting worked on, you can expect them soon. …
as the title says, the new website is live and fully functional. …
hello everyone. I released librewolf v94 on osx, it should be coming very soon for linux and windows. …
hello everyone, I’m one of the maintainers, mostly involved with osx and the settings. just joined the community with a fresh account. …
relevant -> https://lemmy.ml/post/209597
I would also argue that the about config changes he points to are a bit…meh