Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am hardening Firefox with my father on his new Debian installation. Once again, I am hands off the actual machine. Let\u2019s get started!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The popular Chrome browser by Google is literally made by a company that makes money by studying you to feed you ads you\u2019re vulnerable to (ie: more likely to click on) or want you to see for some other reason (a political agenda they approve of). While this is shady and dishonorable, respectively, there\u2019s little to keep them from aiding a government they wish to appease from targeting people on a basis for any sort of \u201cwrong\u201d thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Consider: if logging in to a site online is like showing your face, the browser you use to visit that site is your car. Just as people can learn to recognize you by your car, websites can recognize you by your browser –even if you don\u2019t log in– by all the individually nondescript details your browser shares by default.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Firefox markets itself as a privacy-respecting browser, and while they\u2019re a less-offensive choice than the alternative, they\u2019ve made some choices that chase cash and not all their defaults respect Grandpa Joe\u2019s technical ignorance. Their default search engine is Google. They have a \u201cprivacy respecting\u201d news headline service that tracks you locally on your machine (as I understand it) but ultimately will record your clicks and is subject to its own political bias.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before diving into the main payload, I did guide my father through installing Debian again over his first install \u2013 this time using the LXDE desktop environment. It\u2019s small, and we are planning on installing a different one anyway that isn\u2019t included in the default lineup found in the installer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When starting a software project is often best to check for updates. sudo apt-get update<\/strong> and my father\u2019s account wasn\u2019t in the sudoers group. I quickly found a command to fix that and talked him through logging in as root to take care of that. Once updated, we began working over Firefox using a guide by Chris Xiao [1].<\/p>\n\n\n\n Firefox presents its user with an overwhelming number of options. Xiao\u2019s guide [1] does a good job of maneuvering you through a number of options you may want to set if present, but in the end, it\u2019s up to you to make the final call on each setting exposed to you. We neither followed all the steps suggested nor limited ourselves to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The guide starts off with the settings menu one might find by fiddling with the menu, where it was simple enough to read the guide and switch settings as we spotted them. It then followed in to the spooky scary deeper settings you only change when you\u2019re okay with potential software breaks. My father compared it to the registry in Windows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I made a mistake. In a coming week, I plan on moving my father over to the \u201ctesting\u201d branch of Debian. I don\u2019t have the exact numbers in front of me, but his Firefox version is about 15 to 20 versions behind what I\u2019m using on Manjaro (Firefox 92.0.1).<\/p>\n\n\n\n I will need to revisit this list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Online privacy is largely a fleeting fantasy these days, but I believe it\u2019s still worth working for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where do you draw the line between privacy, functionality, and security?<\/p>\n\n\n\n [1] C. Xiao, \u201cYet Another Firefox Hardening Guide,\u201d May 5, 2021 [Online]. Available: https:\/\/chrisx.xyz\/blog\/yet-another-firefox-hardening-guide\/<\/a> [Accessed Sept. 26, 2021]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am hardening Firefox with my father on his new Debian installation. Once again, I am hands off the actual machine. Let\u2019s get started! The popular Chrome browser by Google is literally made by a company that makes money by studying you to feed … <\/p>\nFirefox Hardening<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Closing thought:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Takeaway<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Final Question<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Work Cited<\/h2>\n\n\n\n