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Firefox Will Soon Block Third-Party Cookies
An anonymous reader writes "Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer has contributed a Firefox patch that will block third-party cookies by default. It's now on track to land in version 22. Kudos to Mozilla for protecting their users and being so open to community submissions. The initial response from the online advertising industry is unsurprisingly hostile and blustering, calling the move 'a nuclear first strike.'"
I have always turned of the third party cookies, but good move for making it a default.
And to hell with marketers, they can cry all they want. They have already stripped most television show of a title sequence and forced shows to start rolling credits while still running. Ihave always wondered why I pay for a ton of cable channels when all I am really doing it watching commercials. Good thought to the creator of the DVR.
"That's right...I said it."
When they just get websites using their advertising services to add subdomains covering their cookies.
At that point you WON'T be able to solve this without a huge mess of per-domain whitelists, eventually coalescing into the cookies for the advertisers being handled THROUGH the corporate websites.
I was arguing this a decade or decade and a half ago to anyone who would listen, but it was brushed off (And rightfully so given that it's taken this long for a browser to actually this by default.)
It's interesting that no-one has ever tried to retaliate against them using the COPPA law, which makes it illegal to track and retain information on underage kids.
IMHO, the next step is to block referrer information to third party sites. E.g. if example.com loads a script from gstatic.com, then the HTTP_REFERER header is not sent to gstatic.com. There's almost zero collateral damage (one captcha service doesn't work), and companies like Facebook and Google no longer get to know every site that most internet users visit.
I canceled Sky a long, long time ago, when they started broadcasting general advertisement on History Channel, National Geographic etc. Went from reading 1-2 books per year to more than 30. There's not much to see anyway: films are quite boring and lame, TV series are the same or really bad production (Sword of Truth comes to mind) and most documentaries are simply ridiculous with one third of the content being useless reviews after advertisements (just imagine to see them with half of the number of interruptions, it's completely insane). I would gladly pay for BBC documentaries however.
Sites will start blocking Firefox browsers...
Considering anyone with 3 firing neurons already blocks advertising to begin with, this is pretty much moot. The reality is advertisers have been abusing cookies for decades, the worst of advertisers have been abusing advertising itself, and allowing malware into their networks and taking a 'cut' of the scam.
Personally? Until advertisers man up, and stop acting like the guy standing on the corner of a shady neighborhood going "hey, wanna buy some shit..." they can simply suck it.
Om, nomnomnom...
Ah, well, it seems they're doing that in the mobile market, anyway.
They're actually doing something about this because some smartphone games for children do location tracking, and nobody knows why.
For context, click Parent.
then the question is, why not doing it the other way round: allow 3rd-partys to access their own cookies, but do not allow them to set a cookie, if they are not the 1st party at the moment.
I hate to rain on your parade, but...
Let's say someone has a website http //www.good.example.com, and want http //ads.doubleclick.net to get past this filter. Assuming they control their own DNS, they simply need to set up a CNAME www.bad.example.com that points to ads.doubleclick.net. Voila, the ads.doubleclick.net server shows up on the same domain as www.good.example.com.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user