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Re: Preliminary work on IceCat 78 now pushed to the 'master' branch


From: brn
Subject: Re: Preliminary work on IceCat 78 now pushed to the 'master' branch
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2020 09:48:49 +0800
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.4.0

Hello all,

(& apologies to Mark for me posting this twice)

On 07/09/20 02:10, Mark H Weaver wrote:
Hello all,

FYI, I just deleted the 'wip-78' branch and pushed a cleaned-up version
of that work to the 'master' branch on Savannah.  It's working well
enough now that I've switched to it as my primary browser.  The bundled
extensions are now working.

Here's a partial TODO list:

* The IceCat-specific settings in <about:preferences#privacy> are
   currently missing.  The patch used in the IceCat 68 previews needs
   considerable work to adapt to version 78.  Moreover, the "Tracking
   Protection" and various other "Protection" features of Firefox, which
   are based on centrally-compiled blacklists and require calling home to
   Mozilla and Google and thus leaking browsing activity to them, are
   prominently displayed at the top of <about:preferences#privacy>,
   although we've always disabled the "calling home" functionality.  We
   should change that section to make it more obvious what's going on,
   and perhaps also provide an easy way to allow users to fully re-enable
   that functionality if they wish.

* More research should be done on what additional antifeatures may have
   been added by Mozilla, which we will need to provide remedies for.

* We should test the preliminary IceCat 78 to ensure that it is not
   generating unwanted network traffic.  Ideally, we would set up a test
   rig with an HTTPS proxy and a fake certificate authority added to
   IceCat, so that we can decrypt all of the HTTPS traffic, to make sure
   that IceCat is not leaking more information than necessary, e.g. to
   search engines.

* We should review the changes made by Tor Browser to version 78, and
   incorporate those changes into IceCat where appropriate.

        Mark


Regarding unwanted connections: You've all most likely seen the recent paper below, but just in case you haven't:

https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

The reference above details methodology deployed to analyse various browsers network activity at "rest". Firefox was one of the browsers tested.

Kindest regards,
BRN.



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