ublock Archives - Michael Altfield's Tech Blog

Featured Articles

Trusted Boot (Anti-Evil-Maid, Heads, and PureBoot)

WordPress Profiling with XHProf (Debugging & Optimizing Speed)

Hardening Guide for phpList

Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (2/2)

Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)

Detecting (Malicious) Unicode in GitHub PRs

Crowdfunding on Crowd Supply (Review of my experience)

WordPress Multisite on the Darknet (Mercator .onion alias)

Introducing BusKill: A Kill Cord for your Laptop

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

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)

Using uBlock Origin to Whitelist

By Michael Altfield, on February 13th, 2017

As some mega websites deploy APIs that are used nearly ubiquitously on most of the Internet's websites (I'm looking at you Facebook & Google), I've begun to compartmentalize my browsers to "jail" specific website usage to a single, sandboxed browser (profile). This is sometimes referred to as a Site-Specific Browser (SSB).

Besides making sure that your SSB is isolated in that it cannot access your regular browser's data (a configuration I plan to document in the future), it's essential to block all network traffic from/to your SSB and all websites, except a whitelist. Unfortunately, getting block-all-then-whitelist functionality in uBlock Origin was annoyingly not documented, so I decided to publish it.

If you want uBlock Origin to block all traffic, add the following line to the textbox in your "My filters" tab of uBlock's Dashboard.

*.* Michael Altfield

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

About Michael

. . . → Read More: Using uBlock Origin to Whitelist