[tor-talk] Including Adblock to TBB to save bandwith

[krishna e bera]

What about making a TorProject filter list for Adblock* users so that
we all look the same to sites visited?

Or go further and include (or add some functionality of) RequestPolicy
into TBB.  Its purpose is to ensure no URLs outside the domain you
intended to visit are opened, and the user has to set up the
cross-domain whitelist.  Of course that breaks many Web 2.x(tm) sites
but Torproject or a usergroup could make a set of initial rules that
cover important sites and vetted https script sources such as jquery.
Being in control of what gets into your browser seems to me a higher
priority for those concerned with security and privacy than placating
advertisers or reducing bandwidth.

On Sun, Dec 21, 2014 at 12:44 PM, Roger Dingledine <arma at mit.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 04:10:03PM +0100, intrigeri wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Justaguy wrote (15 Dec 2014 13:44:05 GMT) :
>> > What if torbrowser would include adblock, this would reduce the amount of bandwith
>> > used, and thus increase the overal speeds @ tor
>>
>> See "5. No filters" in
>> https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#philosophy
>
> Yep. These are some good reasons to keep adblock et al out of Tor Browser.
>
> Another good reason mentioned on this thread is limiting attack surface.
>
> But that said, here are two good reasons to put it in:
>
> A) Reduction of bandwidth, as the original poster here pointed out.
> As a bonus, since some pages don't render until certain of the components
> are there, by fetching fewer components we could see speed-ups that are
> more than just about bandwidth.
>
> B) Potentially significant anonymity gains against certain attacks. If
> traffic confirmation attacks are trivial (I'm not saying we know they are,
> but it's simplest to act as if they are), and websites with ads cause you
> to reach out to many more destinations than you would otherwise, then each
> of those new destinations presents a new risk that an adversary could see
> traffic going over that path. Thus reducing the number of destinations --
> especially common ones like the centralized ad servers -- could help a
> lot against this attack.
>
> For more context, see the "The paper also makes me think about exit
> traffic patterns" paragraph in
> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/improving-tors-anonymity-changing-guard-parameters
> and the discussion around it.
>
> --Roger
>
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