Featured Articles

Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)
Hardening Guide for phpList
Trusted Boot (Anti-Evil-Maid, Heads, and PureBoot)
Introducing BusKill: A Kill Cord for your Laptop
WordPress Profiling with XHProf (Debugging & Optimizing Speed)
Detecting (Malicious) Unicode in GitHub PRs
WordPress Multisite on the Darknet (Mercator .onion alias)
Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (2/2)
Crowdfunding on Crowd Supply (Review of my experience)
previous arrow
next arrow

Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser (3/3)

By Michael Altfield, on March 26th, 2019
Site-Specific Ephemeral Firefox featured image showing a firewall between the facebook and firefox icons

This article is a part 3/3 of a series describing how to setup an Ephemeral Firefox session as a Site-Specific Browser. The ultimate goal is to be able to have a self-destructing browsing session that can only access a single company’s services, such as Google or Facebook.

Part 1/3: Ephemeral Firefox in Ubuntu Part 2/3: Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions Part 3/3: Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser

After setting up the Site-Specific Ephemeral Firefox Browser, you can then blacklist services designated to your Site-Specific browser(s) (such as Google or Facebook) from your main browser. This significantly improves your ability to browse the internet without your activity being tracked by these companies — leaving your sensitive data vulnerable to being stolen by hackers.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser (3/3)

Leave a comment  

Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions (2/3)

By Michael Altfield, on March 6th, 2019
icon of ephemeral firefox with icons of popular extensions below it

I recently posted about how to create a sandboxed firefox profile to compartmentalize (and shred) your firefox browsing history in an Ephemeral Firefox session. But so far I’ve only covered how to create a simple vanilla firefox profile. What if you want your Ephemeral Firefox to include a few basic extensions?

This post will cover how to add extensions to your Ephemeral Firefox profile.

Part 1/3: Ephemeral Firefox in Ubuntu Part 2/3: Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions Part 3/3: Ephemeral Firefox as a Site-Specific Browser Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Ephemeral Firefox with Extensions (2/3)

2 comments  

Browsing without being tracked via Fingerprinting

By Michael Altfield, on October 25th, 2012

Your browser aggrigates a *lot* of data about your computer, and it won’t hesitate to provide all of this data to a nosy web site. In fact, if a website requests a large dataset of your computer’s configuration, concatinates it together, and passes it through a hash function, the resulting hash can be farily unique.

This procedure can be done (and is done) on seperate websites to track users and their activity across multiple websites. If the same procedure [get data, concatenate, hash()] produces the same hash value when done on 2 seperate websites, the website can be fairly certain that you’re the same user. This technique for tracking users is known as Browser Fingerprinting.

Just to get an idea of how effective this is, here’s an excerpt from the above-linked article:

[The EFF] found that, over their study of around 1 million visits to their study website, 83.6% of the browsers seen had a unique fingerprint; among those with Flash or Java enabled, 94.2%. This does not include cookies!

You can test the uniqueness of your browser’s “fingerprint” using this handy EFF tool.

There is a really great document descirbing techniques that could be used to prevent
. . . → Read More: Browsing without being tracked via Fingerprinting

2 comments