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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

Call to Firefox devs: restore the option to keep history for a specified number of days. Why was this option ever removed? It originated all the way back in Netscape.

Also: make a prominent "clear last hour" option for mobile; I hate following a link from someone and finding a ton of tracking cookies have just been added.

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The title seem to suggest this has something to do with browser histories, but as far as I can tell from reading the article it's much worse: they want your ISP to keep a log of the web sites/other services you are using, and they want to get this log by simple request to your ISP (no VSL, subpoena, or warrant).

So restoring this option wouldn't help, maybe only using TOR or some VPN proxy would.

And if you use Tor, keep an eye on the drama that is going in that project now.

Can you explain?

Jacob Applebaum, one of Tor's developers, left recently under a cloud [1]. I've seen a statement by Mr. Applebaum that Tor operations will not be affected as a result of his departure.

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/statement

Eew. The only reason telephone service provides similar records is because it was necessary for billing by the minute with different rates for different regions. But the Internet doesn't require any of that, so we certainly shouldn't have ISPs logging all of our traffic, let alone turning records over without a warrant.

You're surfing without noscript, ublock origin and self-destructing cookies?

I'm using ublock0 of course. I tend not to install lots of other addons because it's difficult to evaluate them without a significant time investment. What is a good self-destructing cookie addon that preserves site logins?

Edit: While I'm here, Firefox should also provide an Android URL intent that opens links in a private tab.

I use this Firefox addon. It destroys cookies set by a tab when you close it, by default. You can turn it off selectively per-website, so it's easy to stay logged in when you want to be.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...

BetterPrivacy completely destroys Flash localstorage on close, which is important because SDC doesn't get them.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy...

I can't imagine ever surfing the internet without blocking ads, javascript and cookies. There's just nothing to evaluate other than which plugin to perform those tasks.

"self-destructing cookies", on the desktop, lets you choose to destroy cookies 1) when you close the tab, 2) when you close the browser or 3) never. On android it's a toggle; presumably 1 and 3.

The android version of noscript is inexplicably named "noscript nsa". It has a bunch of options but I never fiddle with them. You can't install it via the usual firefox plugin system for reasons I don't understand, so instead you have to get it here:

https://noscript.net/nsa/

You want the link "Download NSA++ (NoScript 3.5 alpha)". It's been alpha for as long as I've been using it. A recent change to firefox means you probably have to use about:config to temporarily enable the installation of plugins from outside the official firefox plugin store thing.

Perhaps the developers are trying to demonstrate that you can't have security AND convenience.

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