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There's no point unless a critical mass of people use these tools. You will be the only one on your IP address using this configuration of masked fingerprinting, which is itself a fingerprint.

That's also why it's indeed useful when using Tor, because you're not identified by your base IP.

Unless we make this part of the culture, you have basically 0 recourse to browser fingerprinting except using Tor. Which can itself still be a useful fingerprint depending on the context.

EDIT: I'll add that using these tools outside of normal browsing use can be useful for obfuscating who's doing specific browsing, but it should be emphasized that using fingerprinting masking in isolation all the time is nearly as useful as not using them at all.



Basically the XKCD license plate comic: https://xkcd.com/1105/


Has anyone wrote software that automatically surfaces the relevant XKCD comic for every article this happens under?

I’d like a feature in my HN reader that sticks a red button at the bottom anytime XKCD has already made the points I’m reading.


Randal had a long career of good takes, until around 2016 when they stopped being objectively good.

I’m not kidding at all, that my guess is he was doing drugs and stopped.


Wow. Not liking their political views equals doing drugs.

Must be an interesting place, that originates these "arguments".


I think you misread. They said the opposite: that he was taking drugs and his takes were good, then he stopped taking drugs and now they’re bad.

I’m not saying I agree or that I even think his takes have gotten worse, just clarifying what the other poster said.


1357 (2014-04-18) is pretty bad.

(Bonus points for the alt-text argument being isomorphic to nothing-to-hide.)


He was effectively years early to the “if you don’t like how twitter is run, build your own <smug face>” interesting how that argument isn’t used anymore.


As far as "obligatory xkcd" is concerned: 3154, 3155, 3159, 3160, 3162, 3165 and 3167 are all relevant. (I've found myself citing 3155 a lot, in attempts to deradicalise cranks: it sometimes works, if I can convince them to quit ChatGPT cold-turkey.)

It's fine to like the comics before around 2016, and dislike the ones afterwards, but there's nothing objective about that. Various people have put forward various thresholds for when xkcd "stopped being good", but ultimately it boils down to a combination of what TV Tropes would call "Tone Shift" and "They Changed It, Now It Sucks!".


> Randal had a long career of good takes, until around 2016 when they stopped being objectively good.

Specifically it was at this point in 2016: https://xkcd.com/1756/

> I’m not kidding at all, that my guess is he was doing drugs and stopped.

I don’t know if he stopped or started, but something changed.


A person used their relatively large platform to tell people that they don't support a crazy lunatic millionaire running the world's most powerful country? How scandalous!

In the USA, 2016 and onwards wasn't "just an election". It was something between a mildly harmful establishment candidate or a useless new face on one side, and "holy fucking shit are we actually letting this deranged wannabe monarch run for office?!?" on the other.

Give the man a break, it was (the start of) a crazy time, I'm actually surprised more creators didn't do something like this. If anything, it was barely even a political statement, more of a "hey fellow dems, go vote!" type thing.


Couldn’t have said it better. But hey, they made their bed…


Coming our against a candidate that literally said the words "grab them by the pussy" is a bad thing?


No, but not understanding your audience, not being able to not divide your fanbase for absolutely no reason, and doing all that for Hillary Clinton who history will not at all be kind to…

His traffic and hot takes dropped and his influence declined to almost nothing… maybe those things aren’t unrelated?


We should go further and make an AI agent that creates counterfeit XKCD comics of dubious quality for literally every scenario.


I have packed ff with arkenfox js into container and maybe a handful other people use it https://github.com/grzegorzk/ff_in_podman. Still, most likely the IP address alone is probably the strongest part of fingerprint vector Maybe instead it would be better to have very different vector each time?


> "There's no point unless a critical mass of people use these tools"

That's what Mullvad Browser attempts to solve i guess:

https://mullvad.net/en/browser


You can and should be using a good VPN to make the masked fingerprint and IP address non-unique.




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