Privacy Badger 預設關閉學習功能

Privacy Badger 是一個自動學習的 extension,可以學習 tracker 並且予以阻擋:

Privacy Badger automatically learns to block invisible trackers.

而這個自動學習功能在剛剛看到公告說明預設會關閉:「Privacy Badger Is Changing to Protect You Better」,主要是因為這個自動學習功能可以變成 fingerprint 資訊的一環:

The team also alerted us to a class of attacks that were enabled by Privacy Badger’s learning. Essentially, since Privacy Badger adapts its behavior based on the way that sites you visit behave, a dedicated attacker could manipulate the way Privacy Badger acts: what it blocks and what it allows. In theory, this can be used to identify users (a form of fingerprinting) or to extract some kinds of information from the pages they visit. This is similar to the set of vulnerabilities that Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature disclosed and patched late last year.

所以現在變成會固定更新 pre-train ruleset 了:

From now on, Privacy Badger will rely solely on its “Badger Sett” pre-trained list of tracking domains to perform blocking by default. Furthermore, Privacy Badger’s tracker database will be refreshed periodically with the latest pre-trained definitions. This means, moving forward, all Privacy Badgers will default to relying on the same learned list of trackers for blocking.

當然這個功能還是可以手動開,但就有可能會被拿去 fingerprint 了,要開的人可以自己想一下... 不過不開的話就只是一個 ruleset 了 XD

有用的人可以自己考慮一下 XD

用 Go 寫的 Badger

Dgraph 在推銷自家發展出來的 Badger:「Introducing Badger: A fast key-value store written natively in Go」。

標靶是 RocksDB,號稱比 RocksDB 快好幾倍:

Based on benchmarks, Badger is at least 3.5x faster than RocksDB when doing random reads. For value sizes between 128B to 16KB, data loading is 0.86x - 14x faster compared to RocksDB, with Badger gaining significant ground as value size increases. On the flip side, Badger is currently slower for range key-value iteration, but that has a lot of room for optimization.

不過我覺得有些重要的功能在 Badger 不提供,這比起來有種橘子比蘋果的感覺... 像是 RocksDB 提供了 Transaction,而 Badger 則是直接講明他們不打算支援 Transaction:

Keep it simple, stupid. No support for transactions, versioning or snapshots -- anything that can be done outside of the store should be done outside.

EFF 的 Privacy Badger

EFF 推出新的延伸套件 (有 Firefox 與 Google Chrome 版),透過演算法阻擋嘗試追蹤你的單位:「Privacy Badger」。

在官網上有比較技術面的說明:

At a more technical level, Privacy Badger keeps note of the "third party" domains that embed images, scripts and advertising in the pages you visit. If a third party server appears to be tracking you without permission, by using uniquely identifying cookies to collect a record of the pages you visit across multiple sites, Privacy Badger will automatically disallow content from that third party tracker. In some cases a third-party domain provides some important aspect of a page's functionality, such as embedded maps, images, or fonts. In those cases Privacy Badger will allow connections to the third party but will screen out its tracking cookies.

技術上的作法是分析 third party domain 的行為,用演算法阻擋可能的追蹤。與 Ghostery 這類工具使用人力建立清單的方法不太一樣。

裝起來跑看看,感覺還蠻有趣的...