Ariadne Conill 🐰Mar 10
very cool. this is why i hate the modern web.
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Mar 10

@ariadne anti-fingerprinting feels like a pyrrhic victory to the extent it can be achieved

sure, random webpages probably don't need to know how many cores you have (and thoughtful design could keep this available to those few which maybe do). but the thing that made me conclude this is Accept-Language:, a feature that is intentionally made worse for bilingual users in service of reducing fingerprintability. i think i'd rather have that than a (in practice) false promise about privacy

Show threadHoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Mar 10

@whitequark @ariadne At some point we need to start legislating these things instead of trying to patch over them with technology.

Like, there is zero legitimate reason for fingerprinting to uniquely identify individual users at scale. It should simply be illegal. This does not preclude stuff like identifying bots. Ad stuff should just use cookies where allowed.

Show threadAriadne Conill 🐰Mar 10
@lina @whitequark agreed, but also why do websites need to know i have a fucking threadripper
Show threadAriadne Conill 🐰Mar 10
@lina @whitequark like that is my point here, i cannot think of any reason why a website needs to know i have 128 threads
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Mar 10

@ariadne @lina i ship an FPGA toolchain in the browser. it can* use multithreading. it needs to know how many threads to run to not contend on resources uselessly

* currently not built in that configuration for a variety of reasons that is not specifically tied to the web

Glasgow Interface Explorer

Use Glasgow Interface Explorer from your browser!

Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Mar 10
@ariadne @lina it's not a reason to expose information useful to, like, 1 site you might maybe use, to every of them, and frankly i am not aware of any material benefit from running more than 4 of p&r threads in parallel so it could probably be capped to that. but i think this is a legitimate reason
Show threadmccMar 10
@whitequark @ariadne @lina a problem is we use the web browser for two totally separate purposes: as a way of looking at transient text/image/video content; and as the only surviving application platform. we want two totally opposite things out of these two different platforms ("control the computer" vs "touch nothing"), but insist on not delineating the two website metacategories. and microsoft/apple/android are only gonna keep making it harder to offload applications back onto "computers"
Show threadmccMar 10
@whitequark @ariadne @lina The era where Flash was the "escalated privilege" layer of the web, and click-to-flash plugins were common, was the only time either the developer or user permissions model here made sense
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧

@mcc @ariadne @lina i think this is a reasonable way to view the problem domain but i don't entirely agree—i think the web is about as close to "fully granular permission model, without vendor lock-in" as we ever got and perhaps will ever get, and that it's valuable that i can give a webpage access to a USB device while denying it everything else on the computer, like "filesystem"

unfortunately, i cannot in good faith say that the fully granular permission model works. technically it could be made to work, sure, but getting people to understand the exact consequences of granting X permission is probably a lost cause—it would take someone a lot smarter than me to figure out how to do it

unfortunately#2 the actual, real-world alternative to doing that is "download and run an .exe" or "curl | bash" which is strictly worse. so i just don't know

Mar 10 at 9:25pmWeb
Show threadmccMar 10

@whitequark @ariadne @lina well, but that's exactly the problem i think. we built a fully granular permissions model where we really actually wanted a bimodal permissions model. and because the granular permissions model is so *incredibly fucking complicated*, the browser vendors go way out of their way to hide it, so it's not very useful.

browser vendors snowed us with the useless notifications/locations requests, and now are terrified to add perm popups because they got bad feedback on that.

Show threadmccMar 10

@whitequark @ariadne @lina why is webrtc locked behind the microphone permission. i know what the web browsers *claim* is the answer to this question but imo the real reason is that they set out to make a fully granular permissions model, immediately discovered that had downsides, and have been backpedaling ever since

(I acknowledge the fully granular model is what works best for your goal of shipping an FPGA programmer)

Show threadJosh SimmonsMar 10
@mcc @whitequark @ariadne @lina I haven't really paid attention to what android and apple are doing these days, but i think a lot of this would be solvable by having some permissions be aggregates. e.g. "The web page wants to get the video calling and streaming permissions (fine print: which expand to blah blah blah and blah)". You unfortunately can't really let the application control the aggregate, but I think you could do a good job of simplifying the common use-cases for both apps and users.
Show threadGasper ZejnMar 10
@whitequark @mcc @ariadne @lina Flatpak has a bunch of permissions one can grant, just saying ...
Show threadTóth Gábor BaltazárMar 10
@hruske @whitequark @mcc @ariadne @lina
yeah and everything just gets full read write access to your home directory making because devs are lazy and body cares
Show threadnicole4foxMar 10
@tthbaltazar @hruske @whitequark @mcc @ariadne @lina regarding fingerprint metrics imma just throw in https://amiunique.org/fingerprint
My Fingerprint- Am I Unique ?

Check if your browser has a unique fingerprint, how identifiable you are on the Internet

Show threadmccMar 10
@hruske @whitequark great, now you can ship your app to… desktop Linux users (but NOT to Ubuntu systems which are the most common ones)
Show threadLisPiMar 11
@mcc @hruske @whitequark > (but NOT to Ubuntu systems which are the most common ones)

Which is terrifying given how Canonical has lost the plot since several years.
Show threadJosh SimmonsMar 10

@hruske flatpak takes granular permissions but it does not make them usable. Unless you expect the user to understand what "uses a legacy window system" means in terms of permissions. Sandboxing isn't easy, nor is seamlessly injecting permission prompts into applications which weren't designed for it, but the actually hard part is the permissions model. It needs to somehow be comprehensible by ordinary folks, while not overly constricting for 'power users'.

@whitequark @mcc @ariadne @lina