Tim: > > Even without plug-ins, Firefox has some content-checking features built > > into it.
Eyal: > I use a proxy (privoxy) that block any Firefox/Mozilla connections > when I notice them. I was thinking more along the lines of it's feature for doing checks for malicious sites. It may be looking up the addresses of any links you hover over. > > I'd recommend going through its settings (the normal ones, for a > > start). Then maybe some of the hidden from normal sight things in > > about:config (search for prefetch in them, maybe search for preview, > > too, perhaps disable some of them) > Done so. I still see some "timed out resolving" errors, and I assume > that more look-ups were done without error. Also look for "preload" options in about:config, too. It's bad enough that you load some webpage, and it wants to database you and sell info about you because the web-bugs and adverts it has, just from looking at one page. But then having the browser trying to predict that you'll follow some links, and preload a page for you, is just chewing through your data allowance, never mind the privacy risks. It also goes against what's been discovered over the last few decades that most people who visit a site from a discovered link only look at one page on it: the page they were guided to. And there's a couple of new ones going around, now that people are taking steps against being tracked (rejecting cookies, not allowing location checking), sites are ignoring the bloody huge hint to piss off and mind their own business, by using new methods to bypass your efforts. Doing things through your web browser that try to connect to your local network, and try to connect to apps that may be installed on your phone. I really wish there was a function on web browsers that allowed you to punch the programmer in the face. It doesn't do me any favours that everything I do is tracked, that facebook knows I looked up the lyrics to some song, for instance (and doing that while I'm having absolutely no interaction with facebook). Quite frankly, people get arrested for that kind of stalking. It's time that the fines for large corporations invading privacy were not just affordable inconveniences, but fines that totally bankrupt the business, the CEOs, the investors, and ensure the whole thing collapses. Also the mandatory destruction of all their data. The penalty should be a complete execution that they cannot recover from and restart. > Maybe time, again, to tcpdump the modem interface and carefully check > any unexpected access. Not much fun. I've yet to play with tcpdump, but I did horse around with my name server and web server to see what various gadgets around the house were trying to do over the internet. e.g. A video security system would look for certain domain names to see if it was online every few minutes, another one would only do that if *you* did a network test. And any time there was a event the system noticed, it'd try polling a couple of websites with a URL related to which camera. Clearly that's how its phone app alerts you: The security system alerts their server, your app periodically checks their server for any alerts, then prompts you that it noticed something you might want to check on. And their server acts as a go-between for you to make a connection to your system through your NAT &/or firewall to watch the cameras. The trouble is, it does that whether you have their app or not, there's no configuration option on that system whether it should reach outside of your network. So that got some special LAN configuration to ensure it couldn't do that anymore. Another one thing I discovered was the taskbar app on Gnome & Mate that shows you the clock, the date, a calendar, and the weather, would poll the weather service something stupid like every minute (even if you hadn't put in a location for it to check, nor selected any options to show you the weather). I'm not flying a bloody plane, I don't need the weather info updated that often, and I'm sure the weather service doesn't like thousands of Linux systems across the planet polling their service that much. You could discover all manner of annoying crapola simply by leaving a terminal open with "tail -f /var/log/messages" running in it, and even more so if you also disconnected your computer from the internet (you saw lots of error messages, where previously they were getting cached answers for their queries, so you rarely noticed their activity). I don't use cloud services that various internet-connected home appliances offer (such as consumer NAS devices), but they still interact with them even with such features disabled (including switching off auto-update checking). It's a goal for me to try to stop all the ethernet switch LEDs blinking all the damn time when everything is supposed to be idle. Unfortunately it's an unmanaged switch, so you can't configure things on it, nor directly monitor its traffic. You have to do your snooping through something else attached to it, which mayn't be able to monitor all the traffic you'd like to. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.119.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 4 14:43:51 UTC 2024 x86_64 (yes, this is the output from uname for this PC when I posted) Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. 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