From Newsgroup: alt.comp.software.firefox
Mike Easter <
MikeE@ster.invalid> wrote:
I'm not anywhere near as 'privacy' oriented as the recent msg/s from
Marion. I recently had occasion to explore the EFF site and its
subdomain about surveillance self-defense which led me to read about
their Privacy Badger addon for Firefox.
Privacy Badger is a free browser extension made by the leading
digital rights nonprofit EFF to stop companies from spying on you
online.
https://privacybadger.org/
While the PB add-on was mentioned a couple of times in the de-mozilla thread, I looked back some to see if it had been discussed 'in
isolation' here recently and didn't find anything.
Naturally the EFF and SSD sites aren't advocating all of the add-ons
which have been mentioned in the de-mozilla thread.
My question is, are many Ffx users using PB, or are most people like me
and don't worry that much about what it was designed to counter?
I ran into some site where PB made them unusable. For example, at
times, even after logged in, Walmart.com foists a "Robot or human"
CAPTCHA that has you hold down a key while a progress bar paints. You
had to hold it down long enough, but not too long, to get past that. It
is their scheme to use their customers to block bots and DDOS attacks.
With PB enabled, the script always failed for that CAPTCHA, so the site
became unusable. I had to keep disabling PB to continue using a site.
I have AdGuard Adblocker installed. I would use uBlock Origin, but
Google fucked over Chrome variants with their Manifest v3. Firefox
still support both MV2 and MV3, so uBlock origin remain usable there.
uBlock Origin Lite, an MV3 version, is overly crippled. Adguard's
Adblocker, at least, gives me a means of viewing a log of blocks, so I
can determine what rules to define for a particular site. uBO Lite is
missing the Expert mode to get the same info.
Both uBO and Adguard overlap each other since they subscribe to nearly
the same block lists. They also overlap the blocks by PB. However,
with all 3 installed, you can tell by the toolbar icons (badges) that
there are some difference in how many resources get blocked. However, I
had to keep disabling PB too often, and gave up on it. When a site
misbehaves due to ad/content blocking, the more extensions you have do
the blocking means more difficulty in determine which one to configure differently to get a site working sufficiently to be usable.
PB focuses on trackers by trying to use algorithms to notice behavior at
a site, but the block lists used by uBlock Origin and Adguard also block trackers. The choice is to use heuristics (algorithms) or block lists.
PB seemed to sometimes, but not always, catch a few more trackers;
however, it interfered with site behavior more than uBO and Adguard.
And with 2, or more add-ons, involved in ad/content blocking it gets
more difficult to determine which is the culprit. Just more to analyze.
PB likes to claim "What is and isn't considered a tracker is entirely
based on how a specify domain acts, not on human judgment." That is
misleading as humans wrote the heuristics, and humans decided how those
rules will detect behavior.
You can use them together. The question is how expert are you at
determining which one cause a problem, and how expert you are at
defining the Adblock Plus syntaxed rules to override blocking by the
culprit add-on. You can waste a lot of effort tweaking them to get a
site working, or you can go the cannon blast route of entirely disabling (whichever is the culprit) for the entire site; i.e., you allow some
blocking to get a site working, or you allow everything at the site.
With PB, you have to wait until a new version is available to update the
add-on to get new or changed rules. With the block lists, you wait for
those to get updated to improve blocking, but those get updated every
day or two.
"Actually, nothing in the Privacy Badger code is specifically written to
block ads. Rather, it focuses on disallowing any visible or invisible
|third partyi scripts or images that appear to be tracking you ..."
So, you still to include an ad/content blocking, like uBO. Plus, you
can add rules in uBO to block 3rd-party scripts, but permit 1st-party
scripts. After all, you chose to visit a site, so why block their
scripts? It's the 3rd-party scripts that can have untoward behavior.
However, these days many sites use CDNs (Content Deliver Networks) to
deliver some of the resources in a web document. It is content stored
there by the site, but it is not at the site hence 3rd-party.
Ad/blockers whether using block lists or heuristics are designed to
break sites. The block resources, but they don't mend the web docs to compensate for content the web doc can no longer reach. The more of
these add-ons you add, the more the web doc gets broken. You hope the
web devs employ code for graceful recovery for unreachable resources,
but that's not how they actually code. They expect the content will be available, because that's how they coded the page, and do not check if,
say, a function is available before trying to call it. If you really
want to break a web doc even more, disable Javascript. Some paranoids
go that extreme to really break a web doc.
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