[Cryptography] Anonymous online? A third of popular websites are ‘fingerprinting’ you.

[Ondrej Mikle]

On 11/1/19 8:23 PM, John Denker via cryptography wrote:
> Question:  Has anybody vetted Ublock Origin?  Any experience,
> opinions, or recommendations?

I think uBlock Origin has been vetted pretty well. There are fake clones in the
store, so just stay away from those (every popular app store is such minefied
nowadays, so I have had to resort to reading the extensions' source now. Such
future).

I often add extra rules to my uBlock Origin config in addition to subscription
lists which is mostly fairly easy with the select element tool (you block whole
CSS class in general with visual aids to help you see what elements the rule
will block).

I personally think NoScript is one of the best addons to add into the mix,
however the web is more awful everyday. Every site needs 15 extra CDNs, even to
display 3 paragraphs of text and 1 image (why ffs?) I add every ad network into
"untrusted" category so that it will never load. Sometimes NoScript may be too
much hassle, though.

My personal favorite antipattern are sites that do work witout javascript once
you remove the overlay blocking all of the site (Behind the Overlay addon).

Firefox Containers are very good touch, easy to use and you can separate
identities (cookies, local storage, etc.) by having each tab either in a
specific container or generic container.

Then there is Privacy Badger, but you need to be a bit careful about that since
it sometimes likes to block even the useful CDNs. It's easily configurable in
the addon dialog, but might strike you odd if you didn't know it was why the
site was not working.

Last one is a cosmetical fix for all the annoying sticky/fixed elements - Sticky
Ducky. It seems the 90s have fallen back through a closed timelike curve and now
instead of browser bars you have these annoying fixed elements stealing space
from your screen that IIRC I used at most once in my life.

Regards,
  Ondrej