[varenc]

I use an adblocker, and lots of filtering lists, but most of the `navigator.sendBeacon` requests I was seeing weren't being blocked. Sometimes they were when the URL matched a pattern, but often they weren't. Which makes sense since they aren't ads and by design have nearly zero effect on the user experience.

I still wanted to block them though... so I started killing all `navigator.sendBeacon` requests by replacing it with a no-op function on page load. [0]

I have the no-op function log the results to console and it's fascinating seeing all the sites attempting to use it.Some pages on Amazon will fire a sendBeacon request every second or so.

[0] With this uBlock Origin user script: https://gist.github.com/varenc/7c0c17eea480a03d7c8844d81e608...

[capableweb]

That's interesting, I wasn't aware of "navigator.sendBeacon" before.

Question about the user script. Blocking WebSockets I can understand as they can be used for exfiltrating data you don't want them to get a hold of. But why disable WASM? It can't be used for exfiltrating, and disabling it probably gives them a stronger data-point than just leaving it on, for when they are able to exfiltrate data (via CSS HTTP requests for example).

[varenc]

Oh I don't actually disable WASM. Those are just different scripts that can apply to pages when a filter matches. I disable sendBeacon everywhere with `*##+js(disable-sendBeacon.js)` but the others I don't use or only use on a specific site. I believe I added the WASM removal just to test how a particular site's fallback would work when it wasn't present. That said, disabling WASM probably reduces your browser fingerprinting bits. I bet fingerprintjs[0] uses it.

UBO already has a built-in set of powerful scripts[1], but I just wrote my own for fun. I think I could have done this by just using the built-in ones.

edit: This filter does the same thing just using the built in `set` script, but won't log to console:

   *##+js(set, navigator.sendBeacon, trueFunc)   

[0] - https://fingerprintjs.com/demo/

[1] - https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Resources-Library