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by leni536 3970 days ago
> Is Linux any better?

The Iceweasel bug that downloaded some icons silently on the first run was a big deal few days ago. The problem was that iceweasel doesn't ship the search icons with the package (legal reasons maybe), so it downloads them on the first run [1].

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2015/07/msg00226.html

And this is considered a bug that will be fixed. Compare this to the privacy issues on any proprietary OS where they are considered to be features not bugs. Maybe there are other bugs that leak your privacy even more, at least they are recognized as bugs when discovered.
1 comments
throwaway7767 3970 days ago
I can't read your link unfortunately (get an SSL error when trying to connect), but that's interesting, given the sheer amount of trackable requests firefox makes silently in the background (like safe search/content blacklists from google, etc). Based on the goals stated by the iceweasel project, I assume they have not patched those things (as their goal is to be firefox-without-trademarks and nothing more).

I'm really disappointed in mozilla's track record on privacy. They always seem to choose features over privacy. See for example all of the patches sent by the Tor Browser developers for various info leaks that have been rejected as they would be inconvenient for average users.

It really seems quite pointless to work on a leak like this when there's so many others in the upstream that they refuse to patch (even if they have understandable reasons).

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RaleyField 3970 days ago
> See for example all of the patches sent by the Tor Browser developers for various info leaks that have been rejected as they would be inconvenient for average users.

I wasn't aware of this, what kinds of leaks are you talking about? Care to supply us with some references?

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throwaway7767 3969 days ago
I don't have a list handy, no, I've just read the discussions on the bugtrackers at the time.

A good place to start investigating if you're really interested: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/2871

That's a list of the original planned features for the TBB. You can clearly see they intended it to be a temporary thing until patches were pushed upstream, but it's still around and still adding new patches to fix leaks. You might try to search for the tickets for the issues above in the mozilla bugtracker and you will see many WONTFIXes.

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