Mozilla to Fix 8-Year Old Browser History Leak Issue

[JMH]

Mozilla has announced that it is planning to finally fix a privacy issue known as browsing history leaking, which has been around since at least 2002. The changes will limit the styling options for visited links and prevent JavaScript from obtaining the computed style of a link.

CSS history sniffing is a type of attack in which a Web page is capable of determining what sites you visited in the past. Theoretically, this is not possible because of a bug in the actual browsers, but rather because of a design flaw in the CSS specification, which calls for different styling of visited links.

Source -
Mozilla to Fix 8-Year Old Browser History Leak Issue - Styling possibilities for visited links will be limited - Softpedia

 

[tw33k]

Good to know

 

[seekermeister]

So why not use a browser that fixes it's problems quickly...like Opera? 8 years! I thought MS was slow.

 

[fseal]

Chrome has this same issue, in fact it was the browser of choice to demonstrate the problem about a month ago.

It was actually possible to determine a persons RL identity using it and comparing it to a pattern of visited links, without even trying to look up use IP addresses or anything.

Inter-site user tracking and conglomeration of web surfing habits are increasingly used to paint complete pictures of individuals, track all their various internet accounts and ammase a shockingly complete picture of a persons RL life in addition to the normal product targeting we are all now failiar with. Companies like Google and Yahoo are at the fore-front of this kind of tech.

There is even now a company advertising on TV about giving you access to this info on line. But if you actually go you get auto subscribed to a $15 a month subscription service so that's kind of "haha" on the persoin trying to find out info about you.

But this is why privacy IS important. Even leaking tiny bits of it here and there can have HUGE impacts when gatherd up and pattern matched by companies with HUGE databases... Someone that disagrees with you on-line will soon be able to (or even NOW be able to) instanlty get your RL details and spit them out in a return post or do worse with the info...

(A small example of how this works: Here, my user icon is a picture I took and is also on my web site with my real name, a simple pattern match now links my FSeal user name to my real name and the linking just branches out from there in every direction, maybe I stole the pic, but a few more matches and it becomes solid. Typing habits, language etc... )

 

[seekermeister]

I don't have a website, so the only places that have my real name are websites that I deal with, either in purchasing or some forums. Hopefully, they are able to keep their security and my privacy.