floc
uBlock
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floc | uBlock | |
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92 | 2,991 | |
928 | 42,883 | |
- | - | |
1.1 | 9.9 | |
about 1 year ago | 5 days ago | |
Makefile | JavaScript | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | GNU General Public License v3.0 only |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
floc
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Google starts trialing its FLoC cookie alternative in Chrome.
Draft: https://github.com/WICG/floc
- Chrome vulnerability reported for 3.2 billion users
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[D] Google FLoC and Topics API suspiciously similar.
"The browser uses machine learning algorithms to develop a cohort based on the sites that an individual visits. The algorithms might be based on the URLs of the visited sites, on the content of those pages, or other factors. The central idea is that these input features to the algorithm, including the web history, are kept local on the browser and are not uploaded elsewhere — the browser only exposes the generated cohort." Source: https://github.com/WICG/floc
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Will a VPN help me? And is Kape Technologies ruining everything?
Google (or other third-party tracking) is also not effected by VPN. These groups use cookie syncing to assign you a unique ID and then collect this ID again as you browse the internet. That buyerID can then be cross-referenced (even with other buyerIDs) to generate all sorts of different demographic/psychographic information and used to fingerprint your online life for audience targeting. Google actually is in the works to take this a step forward with the FloC experiment. FloC (Federated League of Cohorts) actually deprecates the Set-Cookie header in favor of in-browser history scanning. Basically, in a year or two they plan to incorporate Chrome into their adtech stack and have it report your history/behavior to Google (regardless of whether you save history or not). Here is some good info on that: https://github.com/WICG/floc
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Google Play Services now lets you delete your advertising ID when you opt out of ad personalization
Instead they propose new standards, like HTML Imports or FLoC, and the W3C decides as a whole whether or not they become official standards.
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Google considers switching FLoC to a topic-based approach
With cross-site cookies, adnetwork.com has full information about what sites you've visited (among sites that incorporate their cookies). This isn't good either! But generally speaking, an individual site using adnetwork.com for advertising won't have or want access to that vector of your interests; many site operators don't even have visibility into what ads win real-time bidding, just that they're receiving money for providing their inventory. Certainly there are players that can provide demographic targeting metadata to site operators, but to my knowledge they are less widely known and certainly not cheap, and I imagine (or hope) any players with wide enough cookie reach would be discouraged from maintaining a database that could associate metadata with PII.
With FLoC, though, the idea was that the browser would provide document.interestCohort() and the individual site's JS could react accordingly: https://github.com/WICG/floc . This means that any site, regardless of its contracts with ad networks, could immediately identify your cohort and associate it with your activity. Web developers working in good faith would be encouraged to have user.cohort or user.topic fields from day one "just so you have it" - imagine all the ways someone could use this in bad faith. Inevitably this data would leak (or be intentionally leaked) and could trivially become a target list for doxxing closeted people. It's a dangerous, dangerous proposal.
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Trying to understand Addressability (for native mobile, and in general)
You can't find any info about this because there isn't really any. Josh Karlin, who is the maintainer of the FLoC working document, said at an event that it might make sense to swap to topics. It's essentially just reducing the entropy of the cohorts and giving them a more comprehensible (and probably less useful) taxonomy. That's all the info there is.
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Apple's Plan to "Think Different" About Encryption Opens a Backdoor to Your Private Life
https://github.com/WICG/floc explains the overall goals.
- Firefox Users Continue to Decrease Despite Proton Update
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Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC
It's pretty complicated and my understanding could be wrong and definitely not an expert. All the stupid CIA-style names that keep changing don't help. Turtledove, fledge, sparrow lol.
But from what I think I know that's kind of right technically, but kind of not in terms of actual real privacy.
Yes, the actual browsing data, e.g. for the basic floc cohorts only what amazon product page you visited, is no longer 'sent' to ad networks (that's a pretty big oversimplification of how ad networks track you but for brevity). That data is parsed in your browser to generate a cohort ID for you.
But this cohort ID is exposed to the world document.interestCohort() and is what's used for targeting and tracking.
To me it seems that the cohorts are so small "thousands of people" + IP or UA it's basically the same as a semi-long lasting uuid.
Here's an image from google's site.
https://web-dev.imgix.net/image/80mq7dk16vVEg8BBhsVe42n6zn82...
It also seems like Chrome/google might be still defaulting browser settings to give themselves even more data just like they currently do?
https://github.com/WICG/floc#qualifying-users-for-whom-a-coh...
BUT when you layer on the other proposals (Fledge/Turtledove/Dovekey or whatever) - which I don't understand that much maybe someone else can explain - it seems like it basically collect this page/product level data and makes it available to DSP etc for tracking/ad serving (again if not technically 1:1 basically in consequence given the sizes of these groups).
Like one of the proposals talks about a 'trusted' key/value server which doesn't seem that different from what already happens? The original proposal wanted to move the entire ad bid/target/serve process into the browser.
uBlock
- Mobile Ad Blocker Will No Longer Stop YouTube's Ads
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Some notes on Firefox's media autoplay settings in practice as of Firefox 124
Check out uBlock Origin's per site switches [1]
[1]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...
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Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive
If ads, in particular on YouTube, are the problem, anything Chromium-based is probably only going to get worse and worse (see [1] and [2]). So that basically leaves you with Firefox and Safari.
I work for Mozilla (speaking for myself, of course), so I'll leave you to guess which I'd recommend :P
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-oppos...
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X.org Server Clears Out Remnants for Supporting Old Compilers
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
Or if on mobile, it is well worth it to look up adblock options for the browser you use.
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Mozilla thinks Apple, Google, Microsoft should play fair
What are the compelling advantages of Chrome nowadays?
Chrome is working to limit the capabilities of ad blockers:
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/11/chrome-pushes...
Whereas a compelling advantage of Firefox is that uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Advertising networks have often been vectors for malware. Using an ad blocker is an important security measure. Even the FBI recommends ad blockers:
https://www.malwarebytes.com/malvertising
https://theconversation.com/spyware-can-infect-your-phone-or...
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Brave Leo now uses Mixtral 8x7B as default
> It allows for 30,000 dynamic rules
That is not what we mean by dynamic filters. From https://developer.chrome.com/blog/improvements-to-content-fi...
> However, to support more frequent updates and user-defined rules, extensions can add rules dynamically too, without their developers having to upload a new version of the extension to the Chrome Web Store.
What Chrome is talking about is the ability to specify rules at runtime. What critics of Manifest V3 are talking about is not the ability to dynamically add rules (although that can be an issue), it is the ability to add dynamic rules -- ie rules that analyze and rewrite requests in the style of the blockingWebRequest permission.
It's a little deceptive to claim that the concerns here are outdated and to point to vague terminology that sounds like it's correcting the problem, but on actual inspection turns out to be entirely separate functionality from what the GP was talking about.
> Giving this ability to extensions can slow down the browser for the user. These ads can still be blocked through other means.
This is the debate; most of the adblocking community disagrees with this assertion. uBO maintains a list of some common features that are already not possible to support in Chrome ( https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b... ) and has written about features that are not able to be supported via Chrome's current V3 API ( https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... ). Of particular note are filtering for large media elements (I use this a lot on mobile Firefox, it's great for reducing page size), and top-level filtering of domains/fonts.
- uBlock Origin – 1.55.0
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In 2024, please switch to Firefox
> "Its happened before"
> That's not an argument
It's a subheading to "2. Browser engine monopoly". The subsection's purpose is describing how bad things were during the IE monopoly to reinforce that it's something to be avoided.
> in fact you could counter-argue that IE left a lot of technical debt
That would be agreeing with the article, unless I understand what you mean.
> On top of that, the internet was very different back then.
In a way that now makes it harder for truly new competing engines to pop up due to increased complexity of the web.
> I'm still not convinced, why would I change my browser?
The points made in the article are:
* Increased privacy, opposed to willingly giving your data to an ad-tech company
* Helps avoid a browser engine monopoly which would effectively let Google dictate web standards
* It’s fast and has a nice user interface
Onto which I'd add:
* Content blockers work best on Firefox (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...), doubly so when Manifest V3 rolls out
* Allows more customization of interface and home page
* UX improvements, like the clutter-free reader mode, aren't vetoed to protect search revenue as with Chrome (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467)
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Ask HN: Is Firefox team too small to do serious security tests?
Advertising networks are vectors for malware:
https://www.cisecurity.org/insights/blog/malvertising
https://www.malwarebytes.com/malvertising
https://theconversation.com/spyware-can-infect-your-phone-or...
So if you're concerned about security then you want the browser with the best ad blocker.
uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
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What is the safest and best browser to use???
Firefox has the best adblocking capability with ublock origin, which explicitly operates better on Firefox. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox
What are some alternatives?
bypass-paywalls-chrome - Bypass Paywalls web browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.
VideoAdBlockForTwitch - Blocks Ads on Twitch.tv.
ungoogled-chromium-archlinux - Arch Linux packaging for ungoogled-chromium
Spotify-Ad-Blocker - EZBlocker - A Spotify Ad Blocker for Windows
chromium - The official GitHub mirror of the Chromium source
AmIUnique - Learn how identifiable you are on the Internet
duckduckgo-privacy-extension - DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials browser extension for Firefox, Chrome.
bromite - Bromite is a Chromium fork with ad blocking and privacy enhancements; take back your browser!
ClearUrls
Jitsi Meet - Jitsi Meet - Secure, Simple and Scalable Video Conferences that you use as a standalone app or embed in your web application.
AdNauseam - AdNauseam: Fight back against advertising surveillance