Mastodawn

BrianKrebs Nov 22, 2024

I might be a little crazy, but I like to browse news sites in a virtual machine, without a script or ad blocker. I've started doing this just to be reminded of how the other half lives.

E.g, when was the last time you visited Yahoo News without a script or ad blocker installed? Or MSNBC or WaPo or virtually any major news site w/out these things? It's a full frontal assault of loud videos that launch and play on their own, and pop-ups and pop-unders and 97 pieces of third-party Javascript.

So not only are they typically aiming a firehose of extraneous and distracting stuff at you, each one of those ad relationships offers the possibility of malicious ads running on your machine.

It kind of seems like we don't talk enough about how this aspect of news websites really does turn people off of reading the news from the original source.

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Molenaar Nov 22, 2024

@briankrebs For these purposes, I have script that calls firefox with a newly created temporary directory and passes that directory with the -profile option.

This way, you have a throwaway browser.

It is inspired on https://attackllama.com/start-firefox-throwaway-session

Sean Leavey: Documentation

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Cassandrich Nov 23, 2024

@molenaar I want this but with a locked down prefs.js and UBO preinstalled in the temp profile dir.

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Molenaar

@dalias My script is as follows:

#!/bin/bash
if [ "$1" = '-CP' ];then
PROFDIR="$2"
shift 2
else
PROFDIR="$(mktemp -d)"
fi
if [ "$1" = '-UP' ];then
cp -r "$2"/* "$PROFDIR"/
shift 2
fi
firefox -no-remote -private -profile "$PROFDIR" "$@"

So you can create a profile with the -CP option and use it later with the -UP option. You can therefore use profiles that are not "factory clean".