Slashdot Mirror
Browsers Which Protect Your Privacy?
valkraider asks: "Browsers are getting better at protecting user's privacy. Mozilla has pretty good cookie preferences. Many browsers like OmniWeb for Mac OS X will block images from sites based on wildcard expressions (like *ad*). Most browsers have settings to delete cookies and cache and such at the end of each session. Even IE for windows (not Mac) will allow you to 'import' a privacy file and control many things pretty tightly. Currently on PCs I use Mozilla with no disk cache, no persistent cookies, no third party images,and many blocked image sites. I can do almost the same with Chimera on Mac OS X. What are people's favorite browsers for protecting your privacy?" Which browsers provide the best balance between functionality and privacy? What privacy features would you like to see, that are missing from those currently available?"
I can block images from a certian server, but not flash ads^H^H^H elements from sepecific servers.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
So many sites are using flash now instead of normal images that the image blocking, while very nice, is becoming less useful. It'd be nice to be able to enforce the same controls on flash content (and other forms of content delivery) as normal images.
Opera and proxomitron. It allows me to filter out flash like everyone's complaining about, and you can set rules for just about everything sent and recieved. Very nice.
For complete privacy you can get your hard drvie reformatted with the click of a link.
Opera! It's got a wide array of privacy features. You can not only turn off cookies, images, GIF animation, and all that, but you can do it on the fly by pressing the F12 key. Also, you can choose not to send reffer information along to the site, if you don't want them to know where you came from. One more thing, you can choose to identify as Opera, MSIE, and from 3 different versions of Mozilla. And that's just in the 6.x version, the 7 beta is now availible for download from opera.com!
I use Mozilla on all platforms I'm running but combine it with bannerfilter on squid. Mozilla doesn't support regexps yet for picture-blocking but is host-based until they fix bug 78104. Disk cache is switched on though as I'm the only user on my system so I don't see this as a possible security problem.
Cookies are selectively permitted and pop-ups are blocked.
Security is imho the biggest reason to use Mozilla in stead of IE.
I use this with both IE and Mozilla. I have Mozilla ask before accepting cookies, so I've added a bunch of usage tracking sites to my proxy script.
You can find a sample of how to do this at a friend's site: no-ads
iCab, available only for the Mac, is one of the best browsers I have seen as far as privacy goes.
It can filter images based on the server, link, size, or anything else.
It can filter cookies based on the server, duration, or anything else.
it can filter JavaScript (InScript) based on server, action, or anything else.
One of the best features: You can set it to only use "Referer" from within the same domain. So if I link to a Sony.com page from Slashdot, Sony has no idea how I got to the page. But Sony can track how I navigate their site (You can also set iCab to never send referer:)
There are more features than I could ever list here. Suffice to say it is very powerful and very configurable. Anyone using MacOS deserves to look at it.
it is still missing a few things, and it is compliant to a fault at times (with regards to page layout), but I use it for 99.5% of my browsing without and problems.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Konq has a feature that I really enjoy:
:). They're erased when you close your browser, thus rendering them incapable of tracking your long term web surfing. Being able to let all of these through means a lot of 'allow this cookie?' dialogs I don't need to see.
'Automatically accept session cookies'
Session cookies are generally those that provide application persistency, applications that often won't work without them - even ones I've written myself
Also, konq has (Mozilla too, I believe) a 'smart' popup window policy, showing only windows that you yourself 'request' by clicking a link etc. Automated popups magically just don't appear.
Blocking regular ads on pages is an interesting feature in Mozilla, which I'm glad doesn't exist in konqueror or most other browsers - I can't see how this could be good for the user in the long run.
sig sig sputnik
Web surfers might want a web browser which offers them more control of their surfing experience (privacy enhancements, for example), but web site purveyors want to see features which take control away from the surfer (such as unclosable pop-under windows).
The result of the collision of those two trends is that browsers (such as opera) which offer ad-blocking and privacy enhancing features are going to be discriminated against as opposed to browsers (such as IE) which offer web content providers a rich set of features. And the more empowering (to the user) the browser is, the more quickly web sites will move to degrade support for that browser.
Its' a shame, but phenomenon like this are going to kill the Internet as we know it, or reduce it to something nobody wants to waste their time on (like broadcast television.)
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Mozilla does support regexp-based filtering through Automatic Proxy Configuration. See http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/ for information on how to do this. (It's not what the feature was designed for, but it works perfectly.)
I use Privoxy (get if from SourceForge).
It's a filtering HTTP proxy, incredibly configurable, and of course browser and platform independant. The "out of the box" config also does a really good job (IMHO) of filtering without being too intrusive.
Features include:
Filtering images, flash and java applets
Cookie management including transforming permanent cookies to session based cookies.
Pop-up window killing
Filtering of any URL pattern with regular expressions
.... plus much more. Really, to much to list. Try it.
I find that privoxy works better for me than the mechanisms built in to any browser. It's based on the old junkbusters codebase with many more features. It's available for both windows and very nearly any form of UNIX (or UNIX-like) OS you might reasonably use to browse the net. (Of course, I have it set to allow ads for slashdot :-)) In combination with phoenix's popup blocking (which takes care of SSL sites such as hushmail that privoxy can't) I find that it gives me near-perfect control over my browsing experience.
That said, if I really suspect that a particular site may be malicious, as opposed to simply obnoxious, I look it over in lynx first.
.sig: file not found
The way I prevent flash ads is by adding a line to my /etc/hosts file that looks like this:
192.168.0.3 ad.doubleclick.net
This makes my browser look for the flash file (or any other ad.doubleclick.net url) on my own box, thereby breaking the the ad and preventing the cookies.
--I second the nomination of the iCab browser as being just "good" overall. Wicked fast (in my purely anecdotal tests the fastest GUI browser I have ever used), small download, installs easily, updates easily, basically "just works" really well, plus all the features. Cookie control is outstanding and there are a lot more speedy menu choices available directly from the browser rather than opening a preferences dialog window separately, images load and not load, select just one image on a page, etc.. I've only used it on Mac classic, but tell ya what, it allowed me to listen to mp3 streaming audio plus browsing when nothing else would on my semi ancient 1400 powerbook, and runs on a real old one almost as well, an old 280c I setup for my girlfriend, that only has a moto 68k processor in it at I *think* 25 mghz.. I actually wish that it was ported to linux as well, I'd use it if it was the same functionality it has in mac over, say, mozilla.
You can save this as an XML file, and then import it into IE6's privacy settings.
r ty noPolicyDefault="reject" noRuleDefault="reject" alwaysAllowSession="no">k iePolicy>>
<MSIEPrivacy>
<MSIEPrivacySetting s formatVersion="6">
<p3pCookiePolicy zone="internet">
<firstParty noPolicyDefault="forceSession" noRuleDefault="forceSession" alwaysAllowSession="no">
</firstParty>
<thirdPa
</thirdParty>
</p3pCoo
<flushCookies/>
</MSIEPrivacySettings
</MSIEPrivacy>
*NOTE* The submit process is adding some spaces..
Line 2: remove space in MSIEPrivacySettings
Line 6: remove space in thirdParty
Line 8: remove space in p3pCookiePolicy
These custom settings force ALL cookies to session lifetime, and does not allow 3rd party cookies. It will flush all your existing cookies when you import it. (you can remove the flush cookies element to not flush them on import).
Use a proxy to filter out what you don't want. Use the browser to render the pages.
/. story today on IE's 'ability' to run arbitray code from a supposedly 'local' page).
The proxy'll work with any browser that allows you to set a proxy, so that you can set up a rule set that doesn't change when/if you change browsers (i.e., in cases where the site only supports, e.g., IE).
More importantly, the proxy (if it supports regexed grepping) can be set up to remove or alter any arbitrary HTML -- something most browsers aren't set up to do. And it provides a additional layer of defense when the browser is buggy (see the earlier
I use Proxomitron under Windows. It does arbitray regex, so I can remove ads, flash, abitrary javascript, etc. I can also add or change elements (showing hidden fields is useful in debugging). And I suspect I'll be able to come up with a filter for the IE bug I mentioned above.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
if you check the src of many ad images they are sometimes referencing a script (htm, asp, cgi, pl, etc) instead of the actual image (gif, jpg, png, etc). this script grabs all kind of parameters through javascript from the user, then forwards to an image so that all the user sees is an image. i guess some people consider this a violation of privacy.
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
I really don't get why this is not implemented. it seems to me that form submissions are of much more interest to the user than plain http gets.
there is a bug for this feature filed for mozilla, and I even tried implementing it. but there is little interest, which amazes me.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
Maybe I am being naive, but...
How is the process of blocking Ads protecting my privacy?
Mozilla needs configurable zones.
Right now you can set privacy properties based on *content*. But it is much much more likely that you will want to set them based on *site*, not *content*. Mozilla needs to take a page from IE, and reorganize its settings so that all content settings belong to a zone, which maps to a set of URLs (set of regular expressions, etc.). In IE there is a fixed number of zones, and hence, only a fixed number of security settings/levels. There is no reason that in Mozilla this could not be expanded to arbitrary zones. It is really burdensome to have to configure things on a content-by-content basis, when it is really the *site* for which you want to configure settings.
Here is what I would do:
default zone: most security risks are disabled...not all though, because many common sites would just be broken (javascript, etc.)
trusted zone: all security settings are open (e.g., my own local network, my office network, etc.)
untrusted zone: goatse.cx, etc. Any sites which I absolutely want EVERYTHING disabled on. In reality I haven't found much to stick in here because my default settings are pretty strict.
somewhat-trusted sites: some sites I "sorta" trust...in that I use them daily and they need a lower level of security than default sites, yet, I still don't want everything on (e.g. nytimes.com)
IE has no notion of the latter because it only has fixed zones. In Mozilla there could be an arbitrary number of zones/setting configurations (maybe some sites you want ONLY flash enabled and nothing else? maybe some javascript development sites you want ONLY javascript enabled? etc.)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?