Nevercookie Eats Evercookies

wiredmikey writes "Anonymizer, Inc. has developed Anonymizer Nevercookie, a free Firefox plugin that protects against the Evercookie, a javascript API built and made available by Samy Kamkar (same guy who brought you the Samy Worm and XSS Hacking to Determine Physical Location) who set out to prove that the more you store and the more places you store it, the harder it is for users to control a Web site's ability to uniquely identify their computer. The plugin extends Firefox's private browsing mode by preventing Evercookies from identifying and tracking users."

Comments

virtual machines

[Anonymous Coward]

I do almost everything in VMs since it keeps my computer cleaner. My web browsing VM starts from scratch each time I load it (with a random MAC address inside the VM). Only the bookmarks get exported and imported. Evercookie doesn't stand a chance with me.

To further improve the situation, I have privoxy chained to squid. My iptables rules don't allow the user that runs the VMs to connect to the internet at all, not even dns. Only a connection to the local privoxy proxy which strips all ads and other annoying things.

It took a while to set this up for sure, but it is secure and most importantly an enjoyable browsing experience.

Re:virtual machines

[leuk_he]

You are unique Just like everyone else

please tell me how unique you are there... (me: one in 627,021 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.)

Since you have a special setup i wonder if you can really hide in the crowd.

Re:virtual machines

[Amorymeltzer]

That page has got to be faulty. Go to the main link, http://panopticlick.eff.org/ - the results are staggeringly different. That tells me I'm unique out of everyone (>1.2 million) whereas the link given in GP says I'm 1 out of around 85k.

Re:virtual machines

[couchslug]

I just use Linux for most of my surfing, but light VMs are very easy to set up and worth doing for the education.

I like Portable VirtualBox for Windows use because I can make a self-extracting .rar of the complete program with VMs for backup:

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/portable-virtualbox.html

Grab a light Linux distro like DSL (small download, speedy performance), and install to VM from the .iso:

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

You can then play with MANY operating systems, and if they screw up, delete their VM. If you have bigger problems, reload by extracting the backup. :)