Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

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It's very disturbing to see the overreach that Mozilla has resorted to and the "privacy" argument (it was "security" before that...) being used to justify essentially ignoring system configuration. My ISP has more accountability than a company in another country.

The correct way would be to standardise DoH and DoT and add support into it into automatic address configurations and operating systems.

Exactly. If Mozilla wants to, it's more than welcome to reach into the VPN area with its own products, but I don't believe this functionality should be part of a browser. They're already reaching into the VPN area[1], should they also investigate bypassing Chinese censorship with their own "firewall-busting" obfuscating VPN? That's not something most users want nor need in their browsers, and such functionality is really a cat-and-mouse game that I think is best left to smaller and less-well-known entities.

It's unfortunate that browsers are already beyond "neutral", when IMHO the only thing they should do is fetch exactly the page URL that was entered and display it.

Edit: yes, apparently people disagree and want Mozilla to control what the Internet (and every user, ignoring his/her default configuration) does. This is really really disturbing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20927832

> the only thing [browsers] should do is fetch exactly the page URL that was entered and display it.

I strongly disagree. Browsers deal with a hostile environment that poses countless threats to their users, and need to be safe. Arguing that browsers should be minimal and not protect privacy is like arguing that cars should be minimal and not have seat belts.

There is an argument that ensuring privacy in DNS could be done outside the browser. I think HTTPS is a good precedent for putting privacy in the scope of the browser; the browser should attempt to ensure that privacy expected by the user is established or it should refuse to operate.

I disagree with the solution of trusting Cloudflare, but privacy should be considered crucial to user safety in modern browser design decisions.

I strongly disagree. Browsers deal with a hostile environment that poses countless threats to their users, and need to be safe. Arguing that browsers should be minimal and not protect privacy is like arguing that cars should be minimal and not have seat belts.

I strongly disagree. A browser has one job, and that is to follow and render URLs. Secure connections and such are services provided by other components of the OS, and the browser should absolutely use those services but not attempt to overreach its main purpose. It's really the principle of "do one thing and do it well".

To spin your analogy, you're arguing that cars should have seatbelts that also check your age and blood alcohol level because "that's also a safety thing".

There is an argument that ensuring privacy in DNS could be done outside the browser

Yes, the same way that VPN clients are; and I'm perfectly happy for Mozilla to be working in that area, but most certainly do not put that in the browser and do not make it default.

>> It's really the principle of "do one thing and do it well".

This sounds good on the surface, but falls apart at the smallest level of logical scrutiny.

It's akin to saying, "a car should only accelerate, decelerate and make turns!" After all, that's a car's main purpose.

Whereas the fact of the matter is that modern cars are built to be able to handle all kinds of hostile environments and have numerous defense and safety mechanisms in order to keep their passengers safe.

The same applies to Internet browsers.

What do you do as a browser vendor when the OS fails to provide you meaningful security and privacy? This is pretty much how we got here. Basically every device on the planet is right now configured to blindly accept whatever DNS server is handed to it by DHCP and there is really no movement on changing that.

So browsers can throw up their hands and say "we are as secure as the OS" or they can do it themselves. Not ideal but the alternative is worse for users.

What do you do as a browser vendor when the OS fails to provide you meaningful security and privacy?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Work within the environment you're given.

Basically every device on the planet is right now configured to blindly accept whatever DNS server is handed to it by DHCP and there is really no movement on changing that.

...and that's just fine, because I trust my LAN more than some third party in another country.

> I strongly disagree. A browser has one job, and that is to follow and render URLs.

wow. not only has history rejected your premise, but the many technologies that exist today in a web browser prove you wrong.

>>browsers should do one thing >browsers should do it all

The essential Multics vs Unix mindset clash. One application to rule them all vs. a versatile toolbox of interchangeable modules. Telco heads vs hacker heads.

In the end, the hackers always win - but the telcos grow to be fat cats.

In a way, it's a Multics vs. Multics clash. I already have one application to rule them all. My operating system. I do not appreciate when the browser tries to supersede it. Not (just) because of philosophical reasons, but because browsers completely suck at being operating systems. The web takes a lot of control from the users, and offers near-zero interoperability.

It all feels like a step-by-step attempt at turning general-purpose computers into cable TV.

I don't think this is at odds with "should do one thing well". Safety is not an application in itself, it is a design principle.

"rm"'s purpose is only to delete, yet it still tries to ensure safety and sanity with its flags: -r, -f, --no-preserve-root, etc. Even simple tools should be safe by default.

We already have applications that can take all your traffic and send it over an encrypted tunnel somewhere else, if you don't want to exit to the Internet from a place you don't trust. They're called VPN clients. DoH is like a partial VPN client. It doesn't belong in the browser.

DoH servers are not open proxies, they're just DNS resolvers with support for a security layer; they are comparable to HTTPS, SMTPS, SSH, etc. servers, not to a VPN.

VPNs are not a substitute for, nor a better solution than DoH in the same way as they are not for HTTPS or SSH.

> The correct way would be to standardise DoH and DoT and add support into it into automatic address configurations and operating systems.

This is beside the point. Mozilla make a browser. They don't make the address resolution code for the underlying operating system. Operating system vendors are of course going to start to support DNS-over-https.

You can disable dns-over-https if you don't want it enabled. Just go to about:config and set network.trr.mode. to 5

> You can disable dns-over-https if you don't want it enabled.

It was also possible to disable Ubuntu from sending your desktop searches to online retailers:

* https://www.pcworld.com/article/2889895/how-to-stop-ubuntu-f...

Just because something can be disabled does not necessarily mean it should be enabled by default in the first place.

That's a really strange comparison. You know that mozilla has an agreement with cloudflare under which cloudflare has agreed not to log dns queries right?

Maybe Mozilla has such an agreement, but I don't. I have a contract with my ISP, and thr GDPR applies to that contract. CF? Not so much.

1)Since the agreement is about processing of this data it really doesn't matter whether you have a contract with CF 2)You don't need any contractual relationship to have GDPR apply to processing your data. If you're a European data subject then GDPR applies to any processing of your personally-identifiable data whoever is processing it and wherever they're doing it. If you're not a European data subject then GDPR would only apply if the company was a European company or if the processing was happening in Europe.

Thanks. I feel this should just be a setting on the settings screen. I use a PiHole DNS service at home which I want to keep using over this.

It is. I just never use the settings screen. See here for how you toggle it, including screenshots. I would expect that the new version will be similar.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-enable-dns-over-https-d...

Edit: I've just checked and there is the ability in the settings screen to set a custom DoH provider. So once your pihole can do it you can set it there.

It should be a setting in a standard dot file. I don't understand why Mozilla can't create a simple configuration file like most applications.

All these settings are stored in ~/.mozilla/firefox/<profile name>

So for me the trr mode is stored in /home/sean/.mozilla/firefox/k3dmofx7.default/prefs.js

I've tried changing prefs from that file and it is a mess. Not adequately documented either. Standard INI-format would be ideal.

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