9 May
2024
9 May
'24
7:49 a.m.
On Wednesday 08 May 2024 13:21:15 E. Liddell via tde-users wrote:
On Wed, 8 May 2024 10:28:13 -0700
William Morder via tde-users <users(a)trinitydesktop.org> wrote:
Amusingly, that page fails to determine much of anything if I visit with
the browser profile I have piped through TOR. It's convinced I'm in Europe
somewhere, although it can't quite make up its mind whether "somewhere" is
Germany, Romania, or Switzerland.
This may be partly due to the fact that I'm using a browser with no
WebRTC support, so the site can't attack that backdoor. And apparently
TOR+Privoxy doesn't leak DNS requests.
(The site does pick up my browser's unusual User Agent, but I've made no
effort to obfuscate that in that profile. If I used an extension to mask
it, the only thing they would know about me is my screen size.)
E. Liddell
I think I remember that screen, as I have tried to run other browsers over
Tor, and have tried various configurations just for testing; such as having
javascript enabled. You get several different possible locations, it seems,
because your browser is making many different connections, or maybe making
those connections over different ports; but in any case, you will appear to
be in several different places.
With javascript disabled, I get only one location, which is not my actual
location. It is good that you have WebRTC disabled (something one can do in
Icecat), and Tor+Privoxy does not leak DNS requests if it is properly
configured. In Icecat, and I believe in Firefox and other Mozilla browsers,
under Network Settings > Connection Settings, there is a place to click boxes
for "Proxy DNS when using Socks5" and "Enable DNS over HTTPS"; all of
which
combined ought to stop most data leaks.
As I said before, though, nobody is bulletproof, and it's nowadays a sign of
psychological health to be justifiably paranoid. Staying anonymous will help
to keep that paranoia down to a very low simmer rather than boiling over.
In Icecat, the only identifiable information is my accept language, en-US,
which could be changed now and then, if I wanted to be too clever, to say,
en-UK, en-IE, en-CA, en-NZ, en-AU or whatever. It would be nice if it could
just be set for en, and not worry about those differences, which is how my
Devuan system is set up.
Also, by way, Icecat has some settings to evade browser fingerprinting. Maybe
that feature also exists in Firefox or other browsers; I haven't compared for
a while.
Bill